Family guy and web developer
My many gripes and moans.
Every morning is the same. I close tabs for pull requests I reviewed yesterday and check which ones have been merged.
GitHub’s favicon shows a green tick for a pull request ready to merge, but it would be nice if it updated to a purple indicator when a pull request is already merged.
Over the last two weeks, two companies I rely on every day have made major financial contributions to a project run by an individual whose views I increasingly disagree with.
If you don’t know, and apologies if you do, here’s the gist.
1Password and DigitalOcean have each pledged money to the Omacom Foundation, the organisation behind David Heinemeier Hansson’s Omarchy Linux distro. Since starting a few months ago, the Omacom Foundation has received pledges from several well-known companies and patrons, bringing the total backing to $18.5 million. A startling pace of pledges for any Linux-related project.
I mention this because I use both 1Password and DigitalOcean. I’ve used 1Password every day for years. I’ve never used another password manager. I have several DigitalOcean droplets that run my own website and a few others. These aren’t just brand names to me; they are companies I’ve built tools, habits, and workflows around. That, and a fair amount of trust.
So, seeing these same two companies make substantial pledges to an organisation run by an individual whose views I don’t agree with is uncomfortable in a way I have found hard to act on. Where I keep coming back
It would be easy to say to boycott these companies like others have already said before me, but that’s not where I find myself.
The truth is, switching password managers isn’t a small thing. It’s more than an inconvenience; it’s a massive change involving family accounts, shared vaults, years of logins, and a process that has only now become second nature to my family.
Switching from DigitalOcean isn’t straightforward either. It’s servers, databases, file storage, DNS, and a handful of integrations I would need to build elsewhere.
The honest version of this post isn’t outrage. I understand why others feel that. I’m uneasy about the pledges, but this post is about something closer to friction. It’s the feeling of thinking I should do something about this, then wondering whether it’s actually worth it once I try to work out a plan to switch to alternatives.
What makes this messier than the typical “company does a bad thing, boycott company” story is that the pledges don’t actually go to David Heinemeier Hansson. Omarchy isn’t a 1Password or DigitalOcean product. It’s a third-party product they have chosen to fund. On its own, this would usually be admirable.
But it’s hard to look past that DigitalOcean reportedly ended a modest, roughly $50-a-month sponsorship of GNOME and Flathub not long before pledging $3 million to Omarchy. That’s not “we don’t fund open source” — it’s a choice about which open source gets funded, and at what scale. GNOME is the desktop environment millions of Linux users rely on every day, quietly, without a headline-grabbing founder attached to it. Omarchy is only a few months old.
The complaint isn’t that they have funded open source; it’s that they have chosen to fund a project, a specific project, at a very specific time. It’s not that 1Password or DigitalOcean haven’t said anything themselves. It’s that they have picked a project with a loud and polarising founder, at a time when his politics are most visible.
I’ll be honest, I don’t have a clean ending here. Not the one you’re probably expecting. I’m not migrating my 1Password account to another password manager today, or even next week. Probably never. I’m not migrating away from DigitalOcean either. It’s not what I want to do, but it’s the decision I have reluctantly made.
What I am taking from this is what I suspect a lot of people are quietly doing. Paying closer attention when my subscription renewals come up, keeping a better eye on alternatives I haven’t bothered to research before, and finally being honest that convenience does a lot of the work in keeping me as a customer.
It’s not the conclusion that many will be hoping for, but it is the honest one.
I’ve been looking at several PostgreSQL clients as I migrate my local development databases away from Docker containers and back to a native PostgreSQL installation.
As I evaluated several desktop apps to manage these databases, I was disappointed to find that many require a monthly subscription.
The subscription model makes sense for server-dependent software. The server is part of how the product works and is often a key component. The product might use the server to sync information between devices or to process information in the background. The subscription model covers the ongoing costs of running and maintaining the servers on which the product depends.
Why a subscription model for a desktop app though? In most cases, the desktop app runs on your own hardware. In the case of a PostgreSQL client, it can open databases that exist on my laptop or even on another remote server, but the product itself doesn’t need a server to do this.
The justification is revenue predictability. One-time purchases tend to spike at launch and taper off, making it hard to forecast earnings or plan for the future. A subscription smooths that out.
I get why developers go down this route. Predictable revenue is easier to build a business around than the feast-and-famine cycle of one-off sales. But predictability is a benefit to the developer, not a justification rooted in the product itself. A $20/month subscription for a desktop app will cost $240 a year, every year, for software whose core functionality was largely complete on day one.
There’s a better model from back in the day before subscriptions. A one-time purchase with an optional paid upgrade for major versions, the approach taken by apps like Postico and TablePlus, gives the developer ongoing revenue tied to actual new work and gives the consumer a cost that reflects what they’re actually getting. If the subscription model is justified by ongoing server costs or continuous development, fine. But if it’s just a pricing decision dressed up as a product decision, it’s not a product that I think I will give my money too.
Cancelling my GitKraken.dev subscription this morning, as I no longer use it. What should be a straightforward process has turned into contacting support to stop them from trying to renew my subscription and cancel my account. You would think a dev support company would have this covered.
I’m glad I am not the only one who struggles with resizing windows in macOS Tahoe.
macOS Tahoe has been the only upgrade I’ve regretted. The scrollbars in the web browsers are a gripe of mine as well. They just seem to look weird when they hit the rounded corners of the browser’s window.
Is anyone else on Micro.blog not getting notifications for mentions? I can’t remember the last time I got a notification for a mention. Very frustrating.
My NYT subscription ended its introductory offer of £6 and is now £12 per month. I’m finding it hard to justify the cost now. I rarely read much of the news from the NYT these days, and I have also deleted their games app from my phone.
I enjoy the sports coverage on The Athletic and read some articles from there every day. The Wirecutter is also a good read, but to continue these subscriptions individually is almost as much as the full NYT subscription itself.
I might wait and see if a Black Friday offer can bring the subscription back down. If not, then I think it’s time to cancel the whole subscription. I’ll find coverage of the NFL elsewhere; that won’t be a problem. And there have to be good alternatives to the Wirecutter as well out there; I just need to find them.
I was sad to read this morning that Pivotal Tracker, the project management tool for software teams, will be discontinued at the end of April next year.
It was the first project management tool I used as a web developer during my first permanent role using Ruby on Rails.
The downside to getting some new tech in the house is the need for follow-up purchases: screen protectors, cases, and sleeves.
I can’t remember a wetter, colder, greyer and more miserable spring than the one we’re having right now in the west of Scotland.
Added to “Things I will never buy”.
A travel mug that lets you control the temperature of your drink and find said mug if you lose it. My coffee is too important to leave the mug it comes in standing any longer than one hour or even lose my mug, to begin with. Thanks, but no thanks.
Have we reached peak saturation point with these annual reviews from different products and services yet on how we used them?
My music player, app launcher and bank have each notified me about my review of the year on their service.
Once again I find myself scrambling about in my web history looking for a link that I read a few weeks ago but didn’t bookmark. 🤦♂️
I remember the BBC providing more video highlights of Prime Minister’s Questions each week. Very few highlights have been available over the last couple of months. Has anyone else noticed this being the case?
The perks of living in Arizona.
It is nice to live in a state that does not have to change its clocks.
I can never understand why we still need to do this.
Docker Desktop is killing my Mac today. Multiple updates/restarts have failed and two re-installs of it are not working either. Going for a clean uninstall and install next.
Professor Chris Painter at The Byline Times digs into the lack of direction that the United Kingdom finds itself in under its Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.
Nothing has changed; everything has changed. Following Monday’s vote of confidence, Boris Johnson staggers on, for now. The lyrics from the famous 1960s Beatles track even more perfectly encapsulate, through popular culture, the state of his failing premiership: “He’s a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody, doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to.”
— Boris Johnson: Nowhere Man by Professor Chris Painter
I didn’t think there would be enough votes on Monday to trigger a leadership contest for the Conservatives. Still, I was somewhat taken aback by the number of politicians who voted against Boris Johnson. The Conservatives have never been a party favoured by myself. Although, it is refreshing to see that there are members of the Conservative party who are willing to take some form of action.
It is hard to conceive of anything that will heal Johnson’s fundamental breach of trust with the public, no matter how many ministers he reshuffles. Already saved twice, first by COVID vaccines and then by the situation in Ukraine, he descends into ever deeper trouble.
— Boris Johnson: Nowhere Man by Professor Chris Painter
While there are plenty of indicators that the UK public is fed up with Johnson’s antics, the only real test of the public’s trust in Johnson is a general election. And the conservatives aren’t going to call a general election early unless they absolutely have to.
Twenty years ago, Boris might have gotten away with continuing on and ignoring the public’s views. Still, there’s no escaping the scrutiny of the people for those in power. With a more connected world than ever before, there are very few ways leaders can hide the ugly truth. I hope that, in time, the world starts to see a change in those that undertake a career in politics. Perhaps those coming into politics will have more tremendous respect for the connected world and commit to doing a more respectful job of governing than Johnson and others.
So, Boris Johnson survives again. “Move on” seems to be the Tory favoured response to the media after the no-confidence vote. Roll on the next general election.
I try not to post anything political here. However, I think, like many people in the UK, I have just reached a maximum tipping point with the Conservative government. Time for them to go.
I was going to post a link to a bit of Facebook news but I’ve decided against it. They’ve been given enough air time on the webs. Who needs to digest even more of it? Definitely not me and I suspect, not a lot of you microbloggers.
So, I’ll just say, have a good day everyone!
Let me get this right. Twitter’s Blue subscription costs $3 per month, and for that, I still have to see ads in my timeline? Undoing tweets and organising my Twitter bookmarks hardly seems worth it.
I’m not impressed.
Growing up in the west of Glasgow for a few years, I witnessed plenty of actions of hatred and violence just because you had a particular colour of football jersey on. It was a mentality that I thought the city had outgrown until this year. Not once, but twice now, the centre of Glasgow has been the scene of violence and vandalism by those that call this same city their home.
The desperate, misplaced, desire to equivocate and suggest the wrongs in the conduct of a section of the Rangers support are shared city wide, hasn’t helped. The Ibrox club are on their own in this city and any other across the global game when it comes to the expression of anti-Catholic sentiment, and that should have been long since acknowledged. It was in an interview run by this newspaper group, conducted by Graham Spiers for the Scotland On Sunday in 1995 with Walter Smith, that the then Rangers manager struck to the heart of what continues to be at play. “There is a Protestant superiority syndrome around here, you can feel it sometimes…”
Last weekend’s scenes in the centre of Glasgow are just the tip of the iceberg of a culture of “fans” who hide behind their football club to justify their actions.
There is a clear consensus from people across Glasgow that enough is enough. Action must be taken.
The GOP is continuing its move to always side with Trump.
In this, Cheney is hardly alone. At the national and state level, Republicans who challenged Trump’s Big Lie — ranging from Sen. Mitt Romney (UT) all the way down to a member of the Michigan State Board of Canvassers — have either been formally punished or publicly rebuked. The party may not agree on much internally nowadays, but on this point, they march in lockstep: Trump’s falsehoods about the election must not be challenged.
It makes you wonder if it’s time for a new Republican party.
Another classy move from the Facebook family.
WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messenger that claims to have privacy coded into its DNA, is giving its 2 billion plus users an ultimatum: agree to share their personal data with the social network or delete their accounts.
— WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using the app
I use WhatsApp for chatting with family and friends as well as a means of communicating with a few groups at the golf club. I haven’t agreed to the terms yet (and I don’t want to), but I suspect that I will need to before the 8th of February when the new privacy policy will kick in.
Facebook has really backed everyone into a corner with this one, but I suspect that amongst the millions of users, there won’t be much of a revolt against this. There are other options to WhatsApp like Signal, but for most people, they just can’t see beyond Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.
My patience for software development over the last couple of years has grown to the point where I would love to throw in the towel with it. A defeatist attitude perhaps, but it’s a feeling that I’ve been unable to shake off in the last few months.
Oh look. The big tech companies are now all just passing on the new digital services tax straight to their customers. Who could have predicted that? All in a sarcastic tone of course.
Many small businesses and entrepreneurs will have received an email the other day from Google which informed them that from the 1st November 2020 Google will be passing the UK’s new 2% digital services tax straight onto their customers.
They are even adding a line item on their invoices for DST (Digital Services Tax) alongside VAT.
That means they are joining the likes of Amazon and others who are simply passing this tax straight onto small and medium businesses and consumers in the UK. Exactly what every online business owner knew they would do.
Two things I’m taking from this.
I don’t tend to comment on political news, but I thought it would be a good chance to round up some of my own thoughts on the UK general election.
It was touted as being a night that will change the British politics in a huge way, but honestly, I don’t see anything that grand other than the big gains made by the Conservatives and the SNP. There’s been a mild shift of power, nothing more.
With a clear majority, the Conservatives will now see Brexit through. There will likely be months, probably years of negotiations ahead, but the first step in leaving the EU will be done by the end of January.
There’s a growing sense of nationalism between England and Scotland. Voters in both Scotland and England want what they think is best for their own country, however the results are wildy different.
With a huge landslide in Scotland, voters are still backing the SNP who will now push for another independance referendum. It’s clear that Scotland wants something different that Westminister isn’t offering.
In voting for the Conservatives, voters in England want Brexit done.
Labour needs a new leader. It’s hardly suprising that the Conservatives got back into power this morning with Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the Labour party. He has been continually criticsed for his leadership, policies, and lack of stance on Brexit.
In the past I voted in the Scottish independance referendum to remain in the UK and in the EU referendum I voted to remain in the EU. If I had to do both votes tomorrow, I would still vote to remain in the EU, but my vote on Scottish independance may be changing. If I were to vote today on Scottish independance, then I would probably vote for it.
I don’t have all the facts about Scotland being independant, but it’s clear now that Scotland wants something very different to England. Going independant is a big step for Scotland, but perhaps it is time for a change.
A big day tomorrow for the UK. I’m not holding my breath for a positive outcome though.
Woebegone. Never was there a more suitable word for British politics.
I didn’t miss much then with last night’s election debate.
BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said it was not clear if either men had won or lost the debate but it was striking how the audience had been ready to laugh at their statements.
— Election debate: Johnson and Corbyn clash over Brexit - BBC News
And that pretty much sums up UK politics just now. Two guys making empty promises and being laughed at by the very people who have the choice to vote for them.
This election is the stuff of nightmares.
I often wonder why we as a planet, can’t seem to get our shit together, and then I’m reminded by people pulling stunts like this.
To summarize: the bill would subsidize four uncompetitive power plants, remove all incentive to build more renewable energy projects, and cancel efforts to help customers use less energy. It is a bill only a utility (and the lawmakers who do its bidding) could love, an extravagant gift to utility investors that hoses Ohio ratepayers.
— Ohio just passed the worst energy bill of the 21st century - Vox
It looks like the people of Scotland could be on their way for another vote on independence.
I’m not that particularly enthused about the idea. We just had an independence vote, and we’re still trying to get Brexit done and dusted. Now because of Brexit, we could be voting on independence again. To say I have politics fatigue is an understatement.
I’m starting to wonder if we’ll ever see politicians returning to the everyday matter of running the country instead of this seemingly never-ending cycle of big game politics.
A $250 set of Star Wars keys for a keyboard. Yeah, I like Star Wars, but not that much.
It’s been a frustrating couple of days getting my laptop into some kind of order. I can’t get the following things to work:
The list was longer yesterday but I managed to resolve a bunch of issues with a single action. These remaining items have been vexing me since.
The Micro.blog issue is out of my hands and has been reported, but the Tower and Spark issues are things I expect to just work, but I can’t explain why they don’t.
It begs the question, have I lost my tech touch?
Update: Turns out I had a keychain issue that required me to reboot my laptop to get everything working again. Thanks to @manton and Tower support for pointing me in the right direction. 👍
Feels like I’m drowning in the digital landscape these days. I need to simplify my digital footprint.
I’ve been moving a few newsletters so that they’re sent to Feedbin. Amazed by the amount of newsletters that don’t allow you to just update your details.
Unsubscribing, finding the landing page and then subscribing again is quite a chore for a few newsletters.
Kurt Harden is concerned about the erasing of American history.
The first is that it strikes me as an effort to erase history. That never goes well. And I write as an Ohioan with absolutely no sympathy for the the Confederates memorialized in bronze, copper, or stone. The statues represent our past and they offer different reminders to different people.
Erasing history by Kurt Harden
I agree with Kurt on this one.
By removing these statues, the American people are removing part of their history. Yes, these statues represent a side of America that many would like to forget but it’s in these statues and the history they represent that we see the progress that has been made.
A sobering read about the future of the planet and what climate change effects could result in in a hundred years time.
Heat is just one of a number of problems we face in the future.
Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today.
— The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
And the problem of pollution doesn’t get any better
Then there are the more familiar forms of pollution. In 2013, melting Arctic ice remodeled Asian weather patterns, depriving industrial China of the natural ventilation systems it had come to depend on, which blanketed much of the country’s north in an unbreathable smog. Literally unbreathable. A metric called the Air Quality Index categorizes the risks and tops out at the 301-to-500 range, warning of “serious aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly” and, for all others, “serious risk of respiratory effects”; at that level, “everyone should avoid all outdoor exertion.”
— The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
And finally there’s the problem of the rising oceans.
Barring a radical reduction of emissions, we will see at least four feet of sea-level rise and possibly ten by the end of the century. A third of the world’s major cities are on the coast, not to mention its power plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands, and rice-paddy empires, and even those above ten feet will flood much more easily, and much more regularly, if the water gets that high. At least 600 million people live within ten meters of sea level today.
— The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
I’ve read about the recent attempts by scientists to create devices that trap and process carbon dioxide emissions but everything so far as been on a smaller scale. Reading this article on the NY mag website, I immediatley thought of the Aliens movie and the massive terraforming plant that features in that movie. Nevermind terraforming other planets, perhaps we’ll have to terraform our own planet first in order to survive.
Once again, Twitter explodes over the tweets of a certain president.
As for what covfefe actually is, we still don’t know. Some may say it’s a typo of “coverage,” and that Donald Trump was railing against his portrayal in the media again. But the sensible among you would reject that hypothesis, knowing that there would be no way that the president would be sitting up in his ludicrously opulent mansion, restless at midnight, so steamed about his popularity that he would pull out his phone and throw out a half-considered complaint tweet to his millions of followers.
via The Verge
Is it a typo? Probably. As a result of a long line of gaffs and poorly worded tweets by Donald Trump though, it is hard to take him seriously. And for as long as he has free access to his own account then that isn’t likely to change soon.
Indyref, Brexit, Trump and now Indyref2. Haven’t we been through the mill enough?
How Americans are still putting up with the Trumpster is beyond me. It must be infuriating as hell.
Same old schedule by @bbcscotland. #onlyanexcuse and #jackiebird. Absolute dire.
If I block every account when I see their ad in Twitter, will I eventually have an ad free timeline? #wishfulthinking
Instapaper in now free, the new MBP has no SD card slot and IFTTT has renamed their recipes to applets. Dark days ahead.
The dust has finally settled from Apple’s announcements. The world has returned to what it once was, but for a moment there it seemed that the drama was world-ending. Almost apocalyptic in nature. Only the release of an Apple product could have sparked such hype and drama.
So what was all the drama about then?
It was about Apple’s new addition to the MacBook Pro, the Touch Bar. In case you don’t know Apple have replaced the top row of keys on their keyboard with a touch bar. Kind of like a long and thin touch screen.
Looks good doesn’t it? I thought so. And while I wasn’t blown away from Apple’s announcements I wondered how long it would be before I needed to replace my own MacBook Pro. Would the Touch Bar affect my decision to buy? That’s a post for another day though. As a rule I don’t buy brand new tech within a few months of it’s release date. I do make exceptions, but not that often.
Anyway back to the point of this post. The Touch Bar and the lack of escape and function keys.
Most people will have looked at the new Touch Bar and thought, “Cool, I can see which emoji to use” or “My photo and video editing might become easier”. Me, I just seen a new form of touch interface that may in time become useful. In fact, 1Password have already announced they’ll be using the Touch Bar to enhance their password management product. Great stuff.
Not everyone was happy though. We developers are a fickle lot. If we’re not jumping from one Javascript framework to the next we’re arguing about which text editor is best. The world might be ending but by God we’ll get our argument across as to why our text editor is the best before it happens.
And that was the start of the drama. The escape key is missing. Well not gone, just not always there. And that didn’t go down well with a lot of people. Mostly people who are users of Vim and Emacs from what I could see. I say a lot of people, it’s probably a small minority but on the Internet those that shout the loudest often get the stage for a longer than normal period of time. First it started with the tweets, then the blog posts followed. It was car crash television. You couldn’t help but watch.
I honestly can’t see what the problem is and here are two reasons why.
1. I rarely use the keyboard on my MacBook Pro
I have a laptop as it suits my needs to be mobile if I need to visit a client but that’s not often. Most of the time my laptop sits on my Griffin Elevator Desktop Stand. I use a Logitech K811 keyboard and an Apple Magic Mouse for all my input needs. And yes my keyboard has an escape key. Here it is.
In fact I’m pretty sure that any developer who values their long time health will have a similar set up. If you’re using a laptop all day to do your work then I would seriously question how comfortable that is.
2. I haven’t used my text editor on the new MacBook Pro
When Apple were handing out the new MacBook Pro for field testing they must have missed my name on the list. Well, not really. They don’t do that. In all honesty though I haven’t used the new MacBook Pro with the new Touch Bar yet so I haven’t the faintest idea how my preferred text editor will work with it. It might work straight out the box, it might not. I just don’t know. And neither do the band of dis-gruntled developers who are doing the complaining. Ask any of them if they’ve used it yet. I doubt it.
The Internet has become the platform of choice to vent your anger, your frustration even your hate if you’re that way inclined. Like a tabloid newspaper, the Internet loves drama and it thrives on it like a virus. It spreads quickly. Even the tiniest of arguments can blow up into a full on international shit storm. And with it comes the drama. People making assumptions that this company is doomed or that product is evil.
If I had a filter to block this shit I would. I would love too. I’m sure most of you would as well. But we can’t. And it’s getting worse. To the point where I’m considering scaling my back my time spent on social media. It’s become counter-productive to use.
I can forgive the tech journalists for their sensational click grabbing headlines but even they didn’t get all dramatic about Apple’s announcements. They reported it, analysed it and made some conclusions. They might be right, they might be wrong, but they did their job. They provided some short form coverage of the announcement.
As for the rest of the Internet. Enough. Enough fucking drama. Unless you’ve used said product prior to it’s release then save your attention grabbing, whining post until you have used the product.
At this point I couldn’t care who bought Twitter. Just as long as someone makes the decision to kill it, commit it or transform it.
Siteground chat duration - 9 minutes. Account still not deleted.
19 minutes to cancel my account on Siteground. As cancellation processes go, it probably the worst one I’ve experienced.
This is wrong. A blatant mis-use of technology.
Apple family sharing, iTunes app and Music app. A combination of apps and preferences that results in a complete nightmare.
How many times before I click “I don’t like this ad” until @twitter decides to block ads from my account?
Can’t wait for @HMRCgovuk to move to one fecking site. Nightmare having to jump between two different sites.
Having one those days where I could quite easily hit the “delete account” button for most of the services I use.
A Wordpress theme that doesn’t display the title for each post in the posts index and each individual post page. FFS.
When did Wordpress sites become so bloody confusing to use? Oh yeah, when every theme had to have a bloody slider on it.
Quit Safari. Start Safari. Github page opens. groan
They should just call it anti-social media.
Seriously @twitter. Take my money and stop the ads.
Still no split-view in Twitter for Mac. Do you have to read the new Moments feature, upload a GIF and start a poll to unlock it?
It’s snowing. It’s May next week. #bloodyweather
Declined another LinkedIn request from a Dynamics NAV recruiter. When are they going to start reading your profile before connecting?
Hey @twitter, if you’re not going to put lists on the timeline page, then at least let me access my lists using a shortcut key. “g 1” e.g.
Remember the days of wired keyboards and mice and they just worked, like all the fucking time. I loved those days.
Dear @twitter, please put lists within easy reach in the web client.
Cheers, Matthew
Pet Peeves: Web sites for desktop software that don’t show screenshots on their landing pages.
I’ve worked in a couple of open-office layouts but nothing near having to share the same table with other colleagues.
Our new, modern Tribeca office was beautifully airy, and yet remarkably oppressive. Nothing was private. On the first day, I took my seat at the table assigned to our creative department, next to a nice woman who I suspect was an air horn in a former life. All day, there was constant shuffling, yelling, and laughing, along with loud music piped through a PA system. As an excessive water drinker, I feared my co-workers were tallying my frequent bathroom trips. At day’s end, I bid adieu to the 12 pairs of eyes I felt judging my 5:04 p.m. departure time. I beelined to the Beats store to purchase their best noise-cancelling headphones in an unmistakably visible neon blue.
Workers need privacy just as much as they need to open spaces.
I’m on the fence about whether switching off CCTV cameras to save money is a good or a bad thing for the public. What sent alarm bells off for me though is the mention of CCTV camera being classed a counter-terrorism tool.
Last night the Police Federation said the deactivation of CCTV cameras would introduce “vulnerabilities” to counter-terrorism operations and “deny justice” to the victims of sexual offences and street violence. But civil liberties groups said there was little evidence of the cameras’ effectiveness and that councils were right to keep them under constant review.
— CCTV cameras secretly being switched off by cash-strapped councils by The Independent
The use of ‘terrorism’ as a reason for keeping CCTV cameras switched on was a step too far though.
This has come up in a few ads I’ve seen recently. Makes me wonder if it’s the new choice of words for “ninjas and rockstars”.
Before the Internet, the best way to make a group of people heard was to have those people sign a petition. Under a common goal, a group of people would sign a petition and have it sent to a person in authority or government. This person is most likely seen as the one person with the power to exercise the changes requested in the petition. It doesn’t always work, but when enough people make their views heard in the form of a petition, it is hard to ignore.
Today the Internet provides an easily accessible global platform that makes being heard even easier. Services like 38 Degrees and Change.org aim to make the process of petitioning even easier by allowing people to sign up to petitions regardless of their location in the world. My view of such services when they first appeared was that they would be a great benefit. People could make their views clearer and more people could get behind petitions from the comfort of their own home. Overtime though, I’ve become less enthusiastic about petition services.
While petition services have been used to highlight and push for change in a number of topics that affect society they also have been used for questionable aims.
Over the years of petition services being available there have been a number of petitions started that you have to wonder what significance they have and their importance.
Asking Death to bring back Terry Pratchett? I would love to be reading new books from Terry but we all know that no amount of petitioning is going to make this change happen.
Demanding the BBC re-instate Jeremy Clarkson? After a number of run ins with the BBC it seems that Jeremy’s luck has run out. I would love to see Jeremy back on Top Gear but I’m pretty sure that a petition is not going to make him a Top Gear presenter again.
Petitions like these may have started out as harmless fun, but the problem with them is the misplaced importance put on them. While Clarkson’s petition to be re-instated has reached just over the one million mark, another petition calling for people to be automatically registered into the organ donor list has only attracted just over sixty thousand signatures. What’s more important?
Petition services make signing a petition easy. Fill in the form on the page and you’re done. That’s it. You never have to see that petition again or even have to follow up to it to see what happens. So, is signing these petitions an empty gesture or do they genuinely make a difference?
I’ve signed petitions like these in the past, but not even thirty seconds after signing the form am I doing something else and I quickly forget I even signed it. That’s not to say though that the petition hasn’t made a difference. In time petitions have brought about change and made a difference. The question is, if you didn’t sign the petition would it still have made a difference? Also, is there weight behind the number of signatures that a petition contains?
Maybe signing a petition should involve more than just signing the petition and sharing your support on social networks, but what else is there to do? Fund the petition with money from your own pocket? Attend a rally in support of the petition. These are definitely options, but for most people signing the petition, just signing it is all they want to do.
The big drawback to petition services is that they are digital tools and therefore suffer from the same single fault that all digital tools and services suffer from. They are a distraction.
When I walk through the centre of town there are usually people hanging about with clipboards asking for a few minutes of your time. Be honest, when faced with people with clipboards, do you usually skirt past them or reply quickly, “You don’t have the time.”?
I usually do one or the other and I’m guessing I’m not alone based on the number of people I see stopping to chat. While most of the time I probably could spare a few minutes, there are times when I am trying to be somewhere at a specific time. So no time for distractions.
The same can be said for petition services. When you sign up for one petition, you could end up being put on the mailing list for other petitions or you could sign up to be notified about what happens to petitions after you have signed them. For a couple of weeks there it seemed I was getting an email every other day from these petition services. I started unsubscribing from the various petitions I had signed as well as unsubscribing from the petition services themselves.
What started as a tool for bringing about change simply became another digital distraction. It had lost it’s value for me.
Petition services are a great tool for bringing about change, but I think more needs to be done for a petition than simply signing it. Physical presence is a great show of support, so attending a rally may make more of an impression than a simple signature would. The defeats the purpose of digital petitions though.
I also think that petitions could benefit from a scale of importance or relevance for petitions. While most petitions fall under the category of politics or society, a further breakdown of petitions based on their topic and their importance could allow people to follow a more select group of petitions.
Sounds harsh, but when you get emails every other day, they become just another “mail for the bin”.
I understand the motives behind such platforms and their push for positive change, but I’m at the stage where I simply bin their emails.
In the past year I’ve read a number of different accounts of police using these harmful devices for raids. It boggles the mind that something so dangerous is availble to US police forces as well as being frequently mis-used.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit wrote in 2000 that “police cannot automatically throw bombs into drug dealers’ houses, even if the bomb goes by the euphemism ‘flash-bang device.’” In practice, however, there are few checks on officers who want to use them. Once a police department registers its inventory with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, it is accountable only to itself for how it uses the stockpile. ProPublica’s review of flashbang injuries found no criminal convictions against police officers who injured citizens with the devices.
Perhaps the most horrifying case of harm by these explosive devices though was the case of Bou Bou Phonesavanh.
Bou Bou was sleeping in a portable playpen at the foot of his parents’ bed when the Habersham County Special Response Team broke down the door to the room and threw a flashbang. The grenade landed on a pillow next to Bou Bou’s face. The blast blew a hole in his chest, severed his nose, and tore apart his lips and mouth.
— Hotter Than Lava by ProPublica
Perhaps the biggest problem though is the attitude that a militarized police force is necessary and keeps people safe. I don’t see a problem with police officers carrying firearms in the US, they have done for years, but there is a problem with how much equipment is at their disposal and the lack of constraints in which they are allowed to use it.
Weapons like this belong in the hands of specialist armed forces only, not law enforcers.
Proof that technology and search companies are not the only corporate bullies when it comes ‘brand protection’.
Just disgusting Specialized, and yes, the actual Roubaix cobblestones are what first come to mind when I hear the name. Not your bike.
A couple of weeks ago me, Jen and the kids headed to our nearest big electrical store, Currys at Braehead Shopping Centre. We were going to look at televisions for the new room we have called ‘the den’. It’s only a small room, it was previously a garage, so we only required a small television for it. Nothing like those enormous 50” panels you see, just a 32” would cut it.
We arrived at the store and found the televisions department. Mega expensive massive televisions at the front and at the back in the dark are the small and relatively cheap televisions. As we were only looking for a 32”, we made a beeline for the back of the department.
We had a price bracket and within that bracket we had narrowed it down to a handful of television sets. Having found the television that we wanted, I tried to grab the attention of one of the store staff. Short of knocking one of them over the head with a set of speakers, I couldn’t get assistance from any of the staff in this department.
While doing this I did see the television we were looking for in stock. However I did want to just check a couple of things with the staff before we purchased it. Having no success at all in trying to pin down a member of staff, we decided to cut our losses and left the store, without purchasing the television we liked.
Having stood there for close to 20 minutes, it was clear where the staff’s attention was. The big purchases, the big televisions. As we left we passed two groups of staff that had suddenly congregated either side of the front row of big televisions in the department. If someone stopped to inspect one, they would be in an excellent position to help the customer and in turn, attempt to get a big sale. Beyond that row, you were doomed for assistance. It was like tiered customer service. Those that spend more get more service.
Once we got home, I purchased the same television online from another retailer for the same price. I could have bought the television online from Currys, but given the lack of assistance I got from staff, why should they get a sale from me?
Most big retailers have online stores that give you online purchasing of their goods, but when you make a big purchase like this, sometimes a trip to the physical store does help you to see what it is you’re actually buying. It’s at this point, that the staff should be helpful no matter what price bracket you’re buying in.
Even in a world where buying online is an option, some customers will still venture to the stores to check out goods in person before committing to a sale in the store or at the online store of that retailer. During this time, retailers should ensure that customers are served well if they want an in-store sale. However with service like this, it can put off customers not just for that one purchase but for many purchases after that.
There are a couple of appliances in the house that are nearing their time for replacement. Will I be venturing back to Currys to replace these appliances? Highly unlikely.
If customers don’t like a store’s service, they’ll go elsewhere, and not just for that one purchase but many more after that. It’s the oldest lesson in the book for retailers but has an added twist for the age of online retailers, customers vote with their feet, both physical and digital.
Nicholas Bate gets us geeks. It’s a shame that others don’t.
Organisations love to use the term geek in a derogatory manner. Often dismissive. Often excluding. And yet when we have a problem be it IT, medical or simply plumbing we would love to have access to a geek. A person who is so good that they understand the simplicity the far side of complexity. They look at the problem and they know what to do.
— Instant Business Speak 38 - Geeks by Nicholas Bate
I can’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would want a phone that effectively ties you to one social network. Come to think of it, a phone based on a social network that uses notifications interrupting you every 5 minutes of the day can’t be very smart.
The numbers make you wonder why the hell the US government is still backing the TSA. Waste of money? I think so.
via Upworthy