Essays
Detroit Grand Prix
I am watching the IndyCar practice of the Detroit Grand Prix, which is racing around the Renaissance Center where I worked for nearly nine years. At one time or another I’ve driven parts the entire circuit, and I made turns 4, 5, 6, and 7 nearly every week day. I am seeing them going 70 mph on stretches I wouldn’t dare drive more than 30. The pits are in a parking lot where I used to park when we first started working at that location.
As much as I disliked the 40 minute commute (on good days), I really enjoyed working at the Renaissance Center, particularly when there were events like the Super Bowl and this Grand Prix because at those times it is the center of activity.
The IndyCar car race is on Sunday at 3:45 PM, but if you have Peacock you can watch the practice and qualifying right now and Saturday.
With AI, Focus On The People
When I read something about the dangers of AI I can’t help but fear the writers are missing an important point. Saying that AI is bad is like saying the Internet is bad or guns are bad. In truth none of these items are bad. What is bad, and what we need to focus on, is that there are bad people who can and will use these items to amplify what they can do and thus inflict harm on others.
Back before the Internet was known by most of the world those who supported it advocated for all of the good it can do, but we failed to take in to account how it can be used for harm. What is common among AI, the Internet, and guns, particularly automatic guns, is the scale and speed at which harm can be done.
So, my advice is, focus a bit less on the technology and more on the ways in which people want and might use that technology for harm and then craft policies aimed at constraining the the people who may do that harm. It might be making a nuanced argument, but I think it is an important one when encountering those who see themselves as needing to defend/protect the items.
Does screen refresh really matter on smartphones?
One of the unwritten rules of tech is the idea that more is better, the purpose of which is to have us continually buy the latest generation of a product. The rule began with the model year releases of automobiles and became adopted by the tech industry. Unfortunately, we consumers don’t often enough question whether the latest features really do matter. We aren’t helped by tech reviewers who often seem to advocate more for the tech industry than consumers. An example that I am thinking about is the push for faster refresh rates on smartphones.
If you have read smartphone reviews over the last year or so you have probably been convinced that phones with 60Hz refresh screens are bad and really should be avoided. We all should be clamoring for 120Hz or at least 90Hz screens so that we get the fastest, smoothest screen scrolling. Do we, really, need smartphone screens faster than 60Hz?
Up until last week I have been using the Pixel 4a, and it’s “limited,” 60Hz screen as my daily driver. When I got the new Pixel 7a I dutifully changed the setting, as prescribed by nearly all tech reviewers, to turn on Smooth Display so that it displays at 90Hz. Every reviewer who directs one to make this change intones something to the affect, “why is Smooth Display not enabled by default?”
While I can say, yes, after turning on Smooth Display scrolling text up/down on the Pixel 7a is faster, what nobody seems to ask is, on a 6-inch display, does one really need that scrolling to be faster? I am skeptical. I am thinking we are being convinced that faster smartphone refresh rates are needed, but they really are not. Increase the size of the screen to perhaps the 11-inch standard tablet, or larger, and I can see how faster refresh can really matter, but on a 6-inch screen?
Another example, at least to me, is the “insistence” that we all need 5G wireless data on our phones. Of course, I ran a speed test using the Pixel 7a as soon as I could and observed the fact that the 86 Mbps download feature is faster than the “plain” LTE transfer speed of my Pixel 4a. Ok, but in what way am I really going to notice or even need that faster transfer speed on a smartphone with a 6-inch screen? For example, I streamed video on the Pixel 7a and it looked no better to me than on the Pixel 4a. Again, if I were on a tablet or certainly a PC then I would likely benefit by the faster transfer rate, but I doubt that 5G is really going to make difference on the Pixel 7a.
To be fair, I do gain some benefits in the upgrade from the Pixel 4a to the 7a. I am finding the front, under-screen finger print scanner is much better than the back scanner of the 4a. The camera is much better and thus I am getting better pictures. Battery life seems to be better, probably thanks to a larger battery and the Tensor G2 chip, and I am happy to finally have the convenience of wireless charging.
Truth is, we likely reached peak smartphone many years ago, therefore there are really fewer needed new features that really matter, and consequently there is a need for more marketing to get people to buy phones. If you are wondering why Google will be selling the Pixel Fold, the reason why is because the smartphone “industry” is convinced such foldables are needed in order to keep selling phones over the next ten years. (The main case for foldables is people want to carry smaller devices, but ironically that could be served by selling phones with smaller screens!) In my opinion, the only change in smartphones that we really need is in battery life, and the technical problem of gaining more battery life from the same size batteries appears to be impossible to overcome. Ironically, one way to improve battery life is to set the screen refresh to 60Hz and use slower file transfer speeds, but then we could get by with last year’s phone.
Google's Tech Ecosystem Failure
I have now replaced two Pixel phones with a newer model and each time I do I am astounded by how little Google understands technology ecosystems. Not only does Google require physically connecting the two phones together with a cable to transfer data, but to transfer a WearOS watch, like the Pixel Watch, from one phone to another you have to factory reset the watch. Seriously! Does anyone at Google ever even try moving from one generation phone to another?
Google seems to think that when one buys a new Pixel phone they are going to buy a new watch too. The factory reset of the watch would not be so bad if one could restore the watch like one can with a Pixel phone, but Google does not provide a backup of WearOS watches to their cloud.
Here is the process for one who owns a Pixel Watch paired with a Pixel 4a to replace the phone with a Pixel 7a. You transfer the SIM from the old phone to the new, then connect a USB-C cable between the 4a and the 7a to transfer your phone settings (ring tones, etc..) and SMS messages. During the transfer the icons for your apps are added to the new phone, but then all of the apps have to be installed. In many cases app settings, particularly logins, do not transfer, so after the apps install you spend a considerable amount of time going through each app to be sure it works as on the “old” phone.
Over the years I have replaced several iPads with newer models and never once have I ever had to physically connect a cable to move settings and apps between the tablets. Apple has been doing this for many years, and honestly, I do not understand why Google, with all of its technical brilliance cannot figure out how to make this process of transfering from one model Pixel phone to another as pain free as possible.
So, once you have the phone set it comes time to pair the Pixel Watch to the new phone. The process requires doing a factory reset of the watch as if you just took it out of the box, and worse, after you pair it with the new phone there is no transfer of app icons, settings, or anything. Oh, and neither the Google Play store nor the Google Watch app keep track of what apps or watch faces you install on the watch, so you have figure out what to install! Anyone at Google who does such a transfer finds this acceptable ought to be embarrased, it might be the most brain dead process of all of technology!
It’s not like nobody at Google has figured it out. Transferring the Pixel Buds Pro from the Pixel 4a to the 7a works exactly how one expects, and how transferring a watch should work. No reset, no pairing, no manual configuration, just take the buds out of the case, put them in my ear, and they just work on the new phone!
Like the Pixel Buds, the Pixel Watch is an accessory to Pixel Phones, but the WearOS, Android, and Pixel teams seem to think the Pixel Watch is a standalone device. Sure, one can buy a watch with an LTE radio and with it and the built-in GPS the watch can function apart from the phone, but honestly, most users are not buying watches with LTE radios. Even if they do, the process of using the Play Store app on the watch to find and install apps is best described as tedious.
The worst part of the WearOS apps process is that Google actually had it right the first time it released their smartwatch operating system. When Google first released a smartwatch there was no way to install apps directly on the watch, you had to use the phone, and the companion app on the phone made it easy to manage the apps to install. Back then while recovering from a factory reset did not automatically restore the watch, it at least put all the apps you had installed in one spot so that you could manually trigger the installation.
For all the progress Google has made over the years to improve Android, Pixel phones, and develop the Pixel Watch, the lack of emphasis on making the products work together seamlessly is a huge let down. Given there have been now been several iterations of Android, WearOS, and Pixel phones, there is no excuse for why the transfer process so brain dead. What I see is a lack of diligence and a willingness to accept things that are not good enough, and I have to question whether such a company unwilling to do things right ought to be trusted playing with technology such as Artificial Intelligence that could be dangerous.
Straight Jacket Voting
We frequently fall in to the trap of thinking that how things work today is how they have always worked. Take for example voting in the United States. The whole concept of an “independent voter” is driven by the fact that today one can vote for people of different parties rather than all representatives from a single party. For example, you might vote for a Democrat for President and a Republican as your Senator.
What I learned while reading The Age of Acrimony is that in the 19th century there was only straight party ballots. The ballots may have been nothing more than a card of one of two different colors. Voting was not in private, one put their colored ballot in the ballot box while everyone else was watching. Elections could and often did become violent affairs. The invention of the ballot booth, with it’s privacy curtain and the ability vote for people running for different offices rather than a party’s representatives cooled the temperature of politics. It also created the idea of the “independent” voter.
You might have noticed that the temperature of politics has definitely risen to higher temperatures over the years, highlighted by the insurrection on January 6, 2021. My theory is that the idea of voting for one’s party, no matter who is running, has become more in vogue ever since Ronald Reagan, when I think the Republican party learned during Reagan’s second term that what letter was next to the name of the candidate was more important than the actual person. The thinking is that what is most important is the party elected to office and not the person because the party’s ideology is what is most important for leading toward the desired outcome. It doesn’t matter whether the President has dementia if the decisions are really made by his handlers.
I think we will see this played out most vividly during the 2024 election. Neither Biden nor Trump are popular among Democrats or Republicans, but they will vote for either the Democrat or Republican candidate. The question will be how the so-called “independents” will vote, and that becomes more difficult when the campaigns become nothing more than don’t vote for the other crazy old person.
Politics is broken because the system is gamed towards the status quo for the benefit of those people who gain from the status quo. Today this is not only the military industrial complex, but nearly every corporation in the United States. How else can you explain why all the candidate we can seem to elect are always of the same generation? Both parties rig it so that the anointed ones are the only options, hence incumbents never are challenged from within, and the non-incumbent pool of candidates are tightly controlled.
Freedom Versus The Internet
The most dangerous affect of bans on books and teaching by government is its erosion on the culture of free speech. While the United States has the first amendment that prohibits government censorship of nearly all speech, a culture of “this is how we do it here” is more important. One way that culture is expressed is when one says, “I don’t agree with what you are saying, but I will fight for your right to say it.”
This article does a great job of explaining why free speech, and thus the freedom of expression of ideas, is so important to liberty and progress. One thing the article does not address is the consequences of time. The time it took for the national mind to change its views on smoking and gay rights was long, and in today’s Internet time, most will now say too long.
What happens in a society when more citizens lived after the Internet and the compression of time that it creates? I think you see this being played out right now with the issue of trans rights, many will not tolerate change taking as long as gay rights did because the have always lived in a world of instant gratification thanks to the Internet.
I think the current tug of war between nearly all dualism is become so intense due to the Internet’s affect on the expectations of change. Half of society demands fast change, the other half prefers slower change and sees the only way to achieve it is by digging in their heels so they can be comfortable. The extremes demand an all or nothing approach, either all change right now, or no change now or maybe never. Both sides are so obsessed with the outcome they cannot see the consequences of the fight.
R.I.P. Computer Magazine
Ironically, I read about the last print publication of Maximum PC and MacLife via RSS and the web, which long ago for me replaced computer magazines. Harry McCracken writes something like an obituary for the computer magazine.
Last week my wife told me the amazing news of a new brick and mortar book store opening within a mile of our house. The news brought back memories of spending hours in Borders and Barnes and Noble, both which were within a mile of our house and long since gone. (Sadly the Barnes and Noble building still sits empty more than a decade after it closed.) One of the main things I did in these stores was thumb through, and often buy, computer magazines, sometimes I would just read them while sitting in their cafe.
At one time I payed for subscriptions to several magazines, but over time as the web grew, there was little point in buying them. The web, and more specifically my blogs, even enabled me to live out the fantasy of being a writer like Jerry Pournelle.
And, so the excitement of the news about the new book store near me faded fast. Why would I shop there? Today I only buy ebooks and I get my computing news and do product research online. I know for many the medium is the message, and I truly hope there are enough such people living near me to keep the new book store open. Yes, I spent many hours browsing book stores and reading magazines but I’ve never once missed the glossy print magazines nor the heft of Computer Shopper.
Googe Nest Hub Disappoints
The Google Nest Hub is frustrating to use because I want to use it as an Android display, as I think I should, but instead it only provides a very narrow set of functions. The most obvious use for me is displaying a local weather radar, which is useful during weather events. A simple way Google could provide this is by enabling Radarscope to run on it.
Today there is an ice storm moving through my area. An option I found is a Michigan weather live stream on YouTube, which I figured I could view on the Nest Hub because it has a YouTube app. Problem is, the YouTube app on the Nest Hub only displays a list of Recommended videos and does not provide me away to select a specific video on YouTube that I can watch. How come Google didn’t provide the FULL YouTube app on the Nest Hub.
I can cast the video from my Pixel 4a to the Nest Hub, but it does not make sense to me that I should have to. I couldn’t even get Google Assistant to display the video I want. some reason why I asked it to display a video from YouTube it wants to cast it to my TV rather than on the display itself!
Updating My Now Page
In 2015 Derek Sivers proposed the idea of sharing one’s status by creating a /now page off of one’s web site. The intent of the page is simply sharing what one is doing. The idea caught on and today many sites, some more current than others, have a now page.
I decided to create and maintain my /now page using Dave Winer’s Little Outliner because I felt it was a good editor for this type of writing, and it worked particularly well with another piece of software by Dave called pagePark. PagePark is a HTTP server that renders the OPML files that Little Outliner creates into HTML. Dave hosts an instance of pagePark that is integrated with Little Outliner such that as soon as an outline is saved, the HTML version of that outline is nearly instantly available. Consequently, the process of editing and publishing changes to my /now page was as simple and quick as loading Little Outliner and writing. Low friction increases the possibility of keeping the page current.
Connecting my /now page to my blog was straightforward because the hosting provider makes it easy to create pages that redirect to other pages. Therefore, when you type https://frankmcpherson.blog/now you end up at my /now page. I took the idea of the page redirect off my blog a step further by purchasing a domain, frankm.info, that I configured to forward to the site. If anyone asked me online, what am I doing, I can tell them to simply go to frankm.info to find out.
Over time I expanded beyond the single /now page to add pages that listed the technology that I use and the books that I have read, each with their own alias URL. Using a forwarding URL enables me to move the actual location of the files, update the forwarding destination in DNS, and instances of the alias URL that I have in my writing will point to the current location.
Since the time that I set all this up using Little Outliner, Dave created a new “version” of it called Drummer. I’ve used Drummer since its beginning and always knew that it would some day replace Little Outliner. I didn’t move my informational outlines to Drummer until recently when Twitter made changes to its API that Dave has been using for user identity management and login. Dave announced he would be updating Drummer with a new login process and also move access of it to HTTPS. He stated he did not intend to make changes to Little Outliner, and advised anyone using it to move to Drummer as soon as possible, and at that time I migrated my files over so that I can edit them in Drummer, and I updated the alias URLs accordingly.
Dave had to make the changes quickly because Twitter had not stated a clear deadline by which it would cut off access to its API, and that means prioritizing what he works on first. For example, the blogging capability Drummer provides currently does not work. I am sure that capability will be restored, and Dave will get to it when he gets to it. The “publishing” of OPML files via an instance of pagePark is also lower on the list. Consequently, I started thinking about what I can do to restore my ability to publish updates to my /now page.
One option was to stop using Drummer to edit these pages, but that would create a lot of work moving the content and formattting it. The option that I took was to build my own instance of pagePark. First I tried using an instance of pagePark that I built under a free account at Render. Render only allows HTTPS access and the free account takes the site offline after 30 minutes. When you request the site, it’s brought online but there is a noticable delay. Consequently, I built a new virtual machine using free resources provided by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
I’ve updated my projects outline with the details about how I set this up, it was pretty straightforward after I figured out how to get around firewall issues. What I have is not integrated with Drummer, so there is now a publishing step that involves downloading the files to my computer and syncing them to my instance of pagePark. I can edit at any time with any computer, but publishing is restricted to few computers I’ve set up.
Right now access to these pages is only via HTTP. I’ve looked at the page source for Drummer to see how Dave has changed the includes and I think I should be able to edit the templates pagePark uses with the right form of those includes to eliminate the mixed content errors. I intend to use the instance of pagePark I have on Render to test that work when I have time. If I get access to these files working on Render I will then have to decided how to handle the SSL certificates if I move off Render, which I would probably do by using Caddy.
Look In The Mirror, There Is a Gun In Your Hands
If one is a child, a teenager, a college student in the United States, aware of the realities of the society that they currently live in, how can you possibily conclude anything other than the fact that the generations older, now Millenials through Baby Boomers, don’t care about them at all? It’s seems we have all forgotten the desire for providing our children a better life than our own. Better should be safer. Instead we do absolutely nothing.
I am Gen-X, and to my recollection the last time enough people in power were shocked enough by a shooting was in 1993 when the Brady Bill was passed. Looking back from today, it seems that only the attempted murder of an old white man who happens to be President lead to action. Not murders of elementary, high school, and college students.
I see people of my generation ripping on younger generations as “entitled” and “lazy” and don’t seem to really care why. Might it be that in the United States the probability of a kindergartener experiencing an in-school shooting before graduating high school is greater than zero? I don’t know this is a fact, but I know it’s true, but the fact is that truth does not piss off enough people to take action.
Parents and grandparents need to stop convincing themselves their child will never face a shooting. It’s time to stop numbing ourselves hoping that it will never happen. It’s time to face the reality that it will happen, to your child, someone you love, maybe tomorrow.