Matthew Lang

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.

Misplaced Importance on Petitions

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?

The Empty Gesture

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.

Another Digital Distraction

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 Still Require Action

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.

Good to see Marco Arment switching to DuckDuckGo.

I've been using it for the best part of two years. I don't see me ever going back to using Google.

I've been running Tether on both my Macbook Pro and iPhone for a week now. Install it on both and when you walk away it locks your Macbook. Walk back and it unlocks it. Brilliant!

I have burned through a number of different tool choices over the last two years. In an effort to find the best tools that fit how I work, I've tried a number of different alternatives. Source code hosting, web app hosting, productivity, bookmarking, social networking and content curation to name a few categories.

For the most part the tools I have tried haven't worked out for me when I compare them to the tools that I was initially using. In most cases I've come full circle.

Take bookmarking for example. I've went from using Pinboard, going through a number of home grown solutions, to using Pocket and then eventually coming back to Pinboard. I've started wondering why I even stopped using Pinboard in the first place. So why did I stop using Pinboard?

I'll be honest, I can't put my finger on it exactly but I know there's an aspect of my personality where I like things to change every now and again. It's a behaviour that I've known since I was a kid. When I get too familiar or settled with something, I start looking for alternatives.

This is okay for the curious ones but in the last couple of years I've tried so many different tools that I'm starting to wonder if it was worth all the hassle, effort and money.

Probably not, but I have learned that if something works, then there's little reason to change it for something else.

Kids have the wonder and curiosity that adults have spent many years replacing with logic and skepticism. To a kid, what looks like some moss on a rock is, in fact, a fairy chair. That skyscraper is a rocket ship. A few trees in a park are a mighty forest where woodland creatures come alive. A kid will shoot the truth they see.

— Give your camera to your kid ... by Patrick Rhone

A great piece on being an introvert.

My thoughts are my thoughts. I share what I choose to, and the rest is mine. Don't quiz me, demand to know what I'm thinking, tell me I'm meant to share. I have a right to privacy. Don't assume that because you want to share everything with me, that I should want to share everything with you. Don't present your view of the world as the only possible option, and that I must be somehow emotionally stunted, wrong, or hiding something.

— Introvert by Iain Simpson

via FGGT

Left unchecked, you could easily waste away your time online. Posting, bookmarking, pinning, reading, uploading, downloading, torrenting and streaming. We've entered into an era of the Internet where there's growing demand for you to be connected to anything and everything. If it's not managed properly you could easily get sucked into an almost endless zombie state of clicking, scrolling and swiping. It's something that I've grown more aware of over the years, but with kids in the house, you suddenly become more aware of how much time you spend being connected. I don't want my kids to remember their parents as "those two with their heads creaking into their phones".

With this in mind, I've started being a little bit more selective of how I manage my time being connected. This doesn't necessarily mean that I only class the time I'm on the Internet, this can include any form contact with my laptop and smartphone. Cutting back on the this time is the key, but how do we do this?

In the last couple of weeks I've made a few changes to the apps I'm using and how I use them, and I've found that there's two key places where you can improve severing that attachment to technology. Automation and filtering.

Automation

Automation is the ability to take a number of manual steps and make them run on their own without any human intervention. Sounds a bit daunting to start with, but there are in fact a number of great services that can make detaching from technology easier.

I've used IFTTT for the last couple of years to automate a few things between different services I use. I wouldn't call myself a power user, but it's easy to set up recipes means that you can schedule all manner of action between the different channels you might use.

I've only just started using Zapier in the last couple of weeks. IFTTT is great but I've heard good reviews about Zapier as well. My first impressions of it are good, and while they don't cover all the same channels that IFTTT does, they do have a vast catalog of services that you can hook into.

Using tools like this can handle the mundane tasks for you, like backing up your photographs to Dropbox or builing lists on Twitter for an event you're attending. Each step might only take a few seconds to do, but given that you'll probably end up repeating these steps time and time again, it's worth looking at tools like IFTTT and Zapier to handle them for you.

Filtering

Filtering is where we want to pick out the signals from the noise. What's the important stuff? It's something I haven't used much in the past, but I've finding it to be more and more useful to limit my time online.

Perhaps the first place you might have came across filtering is on a number of Twitter clients. Tweetbot and Echofon allow you to mute keywords in your stream. This comes in handy when you don't want to see tweets about a particular topic. I recently muted keywords for the Apple Watch event a couple of weeks ago and recently also blocked tweets from the SXSW event. Both topics weren not in my interests and so to stop my timeline being polluted with links to these I muted them in Echofon.

The last place I've seen filtering avaialble but haven't used yet is in the RSS reader application, Feedbin. For each of the RSS feeds you have, Feedbin gives you the option to mute a feed. I haven't used this yet but knowing this feature is here means that I'm abit more open to subscribing to other RSS feeds. I can mute feeds that are perhaps covering a specific topic over a number of days or weeks and if it's something I'm not interested in, I can mute for that period of time.

This is just a couple of ways in which I manage the daily onslaught of information. I would be interested to hear of other suggestions that you use to manage and reduce your time being connected to the digital world.

... and his drive to keep Dropbox being a successful product.

Excellent interview with Dropbox's founder. I've been a happy Dropbox user for years. I see it's single biggest benefit has being platform independent. You can run Dropbox on Windows, OS X and Linux. If and when I decide to switch from OS X, it's good to know that I can take everything with me.

Lots of cities could learn a thing or two when it comes to figuring out how to get the best of both worlds for drivers and cyclists.

The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood.

— Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley

I'm always keeping an eye on the future for the next "best thing" in programming, but to be honest I'm finding it hard to justify picking up a new language on the basis that it might take off. Rails is seen as old hat now but it's also tried and tested and perfectly suitable for building web applications and services. Yeah it's not on the edge anymore but then I know what to do when something goes wrong.

I spent Sunday down at Barassie Links with Ethan and the rest of the Elderslie Juniors Newton Shield team. Just one of the Elderslie team won their match, but they kept their heads up and done their best.

Ethan might have got beat in his match, but he did finish in spectacular fashion.

Special thanks to the organisers from both golf clubs and to each of the teams for a great day.

During the week I found out that Flexibits were releasing a major upgrade to their OS X calender app, Fantastical. When Fantastical first came out, I bought a copy from the App Store and since then I've used it on a daily basis. I can't remember how much I paid for it, but it was money well spent. For close to two years, I got an excellent calendar app that sat in my menu bar and did the job it was intended to do. It came with a number of minor upgrades to the application over the time that I used it. Not bad value for money.

Today I opened the App Store, found Fantastical 2, bought it and installed it. No hesitation, no pondering if the application is in fact worth the purchase or even deciding whether Flexibits deserve my hard-earned cash for the new version of Fantastical (they do btw).

I don't mind paying for major upgrades to software that I use. Not only am I supporting the future of the software product that I am using by ensuring money goes back into the company that produced it, but I'm also supporting the developers who make the software. For developers, writing code is a way of making an income to support themselves and in some cases also supporting their families. Some developers work for clients, some provide consulting services, but for indie developers and small software houses like Flexibits, they work on a business model that requires income from people buying their software. Nothing wrong with that. It's how many businesses work.

Here's the problem though. Some people expect the software they buy to be supported for life. That's a ridiculous idea and here's why.

Software doesn't last for ever.

Changing operating systems and technology as well changes in the way we work means that software will always change. It's just the way things are, and it's not restricted to the world of technology and software either. Lots of products we buy can last for years, but they'll rarely last us a lifetime. Software isn't any different. When I buy a software product, I'll expect a couple of years worth of updates before having to buy the next version up of the product. It just makes sense.

When apps first appeared on the App Store as different versions, there was an initial push back against the idea. People were complaining about having to buy the app again that they had already forked out a few dollars for in the past. I'm glad to see though that there's less resistance to the idea of new major versions of software and apps coming with a price tag.

If the app you use makes a positive difference to your day, then why wouldn't you fork out the money for a new major version of it? If the developer of the app is releasing a new major version every year then I might see the point against paying for that app, but most app developers are giving their apps a couple of years at least before releasing a completely new version of their app.

Software doesn't last for ever, but with the support of you as a paying customer, it can keep going for as long as the developer has the financial support they need to keep working on it. That's a small price to pay for an app that makes a big difference to your day.

... all the way from sunny Arizona.

Thanks Michael.

Okay, maybe not NSA busting but definitely more secure than thinking up your own passphrase.

Tools & Toys excellent guide to analog writing tools.

Tempted to purchase a few Field Notes books.