Essays
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Continue to support older Pixel phones for several more future releases of Android. Google forced me to by a Pixel 2 because it announced Android 9 will not support the Nexus 6P, which I previously owned. In short Google should not continue only providing two operating system upgrades for their Pixel phones. The latest version of iOS supports five generations of iPhones and Android needs to do the same for Pixel phones.
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Keep selling at least two generations of Pixel phones and lower the price of the older generation. Right now the Pixel 2 is still available at the Google Store, but for how long? I think Google needs to keep selling the Pixel 2 until it announces the Pixel 4, which then builds in a lower priced Pixel.
Planting A Garden
A few weeks ago I read The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral by Mike Caulfield and it really resonated with me. In my mind almost all of what I write on the web is part of my own garden, even though I do that writing using blogging tools that are more stream than garden.
One thing that I would add to idea of a garden or stream is structure. I personally like drilling down into a topic, which is why ever since I first experienced hyperlinks and the web it clicked. My affinity toward structure is also why I find outlines appealing.
Chronology (reverse), archives, and permalinks are structures of blogs that I think distinguish it technologically from “regular” web sites. The informal personal voice of blogs is what distinguishes the blog writing style from other writing styles you see on the web.
And yet, blogs writing is also point in time. One writes a blog post, it enters the stream, and beyond perhaps that first day one rarely, if ever, edits or adds to a blog post.
The ongoing revision of a piece of writing is fundamentally what I think Caulfield means by “the garden.” With that paradigm, I created two “projects”, the first being a web page in which I originally wrote about which Chromebook I was going to buy and then continually revised that page as I learned more up until I made my decision. The second project is a new page in which I am recording my experience with using the Pixelbook.
In both instances I created and maintained those pages using jekyll and offline tools like Drafts and Typora, which I find works very well. However, it feels that a wiki is more in tune with the garden concept which is why I have been dabbling with wikis.
Right now, this whole thing is work in progress. I think I favor the offline ability I have with my jekyll and Netlify set up versus in browser editing required by DokuWiki.
Traveling Light
I’ve been traveling over the past week, visiting family and friends throughout Michigan and Wisconsin. This morning I am packing up to depart on the next leg of my trip and struck by how few bags I have on this trip.
Ten years ago when I made this trip I packed one or two plastic bins for power cords, surge protectors, WiFi access points and more. I may have had a few bags for computers and then my regular luggage.
Now, all of my electronics that includes one notebook computer, two tablets, and their associated cords all fit in to one backpack. I have on suitecase and that is it. Obviously, the electronics that I carry is much smaller than ten years ago, but I am also helped by updated hotels with plenty of power outlets and WiFi. No more hunting around and moving furniture to find an available outlet.
Still Standing
We saw Elton John last night for the first and last time, as this is his farewell tour and I believe it to be true. The show was fantastic, particularly when you consider that Elton is 71 years old. He played for a little over two and a half hours, with no intermission. After each song he would stand up, acknowledge the crowd as he did a circle around the piano seat, take a drink of water, sit down and launch into another song.
I’ve never seen a musical act with so much percussion. Two full drum sets, three drummers, including tympani, bells, and tambourine. The dude playing the tambourine, which was well miced, got more video time than the guitars. The act, however, had no cowbell.
Finally, a couple notes on Little Caesar’s Arena. It was the first concert that we attended at LCA. In an email the day before we were told the arena would open at 6:30 PM and encouraged people to come early, Elton was starting promptly at 8 PM. The arena didn’t open until 7 PM, which was very annoying.
We had seats in the upper bowl, which frankly were the cheapest seats. The climb to the seats in the upper bowl is pretty steep, and I felt bad for some of thr elderly and disabled who made the climb.
More Thoughts About The Google Pixel Slate
Google classifies the Pixel Slate as a Tablet with Google Assistant. Based on my definition of tablets, the Slate is not a tablet, it is a 2-in-1. If you stick to Google’s view of it as a tablet then I stand by my initial impression that the Slate could be DOA.
My concerns about it are driven by the total cost of ownership. I start with the 8 GB, 64 GB, Intel Core M model that costs $799, and then add a keyboard, either the Google keyboard that costs $199 or the Brydge G-Type that costs $159, making the minimum total cost $958; throw in the pen and that is just north of $1,000. For my money I much rather buy the Pixelbook or any one of the newer Chromebooks than pay $1000 for the Slate 2-in-1. Arguably the Surface Pro 6 is a better option, and it would definitely be better for me because I know I can use a pen with OneNote.
The Slate does look like a nice piece of hardware, and if you want Android and Linux apps on a 2-in-1 it’s your only viable option, but is that option more appealing than an iPad Pro? Particularly a newer, larger screen, same form factor, smaller bezel iPad Pro? I am skeptical.
My Definition Of A Tablet
I do not think we should define a tablet as a screen without a keyboard, instead a tablet ought to be defined by how it is most commonly used, by which I mean you mostly use it in portrait orientation like one would a notepad of paper or a book.
In my opinion, a tablet has at least a 7-inch screen and is comfortable to hold and use for long periods of time with the device in a portriat orientation. Consequently devices that claim to be a tablet that have a 12-inch or larger screen are not really tablets, they really fall into a tweener (with notebooks), 2-in-1 category.
Based on how I use my iPad Pro 10.5, it is more a 2-in-1 because it is mostly used in landscape or when in portraint lying on a desk. By my defintion the only true tablets that I own are the iPad Mini 4 and the Nexus 9. The iPad and it’s 9.7-inch screen is probably the largest screen size for a tablet.
My tablet use case definition might account for why tablets have not really overwhelmed the market. Apple had great initial success with the iPad, but sales started to taper off until the introduced the Pro line and significantly decreased the price of the regular iPad. The Pro line really fills the 2-in-1 market, while the lower price iPad has gained sales from holdouts who have wanted one the past but found them too expensive.
Further, by my defintion, the most successful tablet maker is likely Amazon with their cheap 7-inch and 8-inch tablets.
Changes Google Needs To Make
I have a hard time swallowing the $150 price increase between the Google Pixel 2 and the Pixel 3. I know Google can set prices the market will bear, but when I look at the difference I ask myself is the price increase due to higher costs or a desire for a higher profit margin?
Just about every Android phone that I have owned, from the original T-Mobile G1 to my current Pixel 2, has been either a Nexus or Made by Google phone because I value having the pure version of Android that is directly and quickly updated by Google. Having suffered during my Windows Mobile days of delayed software updates due to OEM timelines, I have tried to avoid such situations.
I want to keep using Pixel phones, Google seems to want to be in the premium priced smartphone market. What can be done? Google can follow Apple’s lead into that premium market by doing the following:
It seems clear to me that smartphone prices have gone up across the board because Apple increased the price of the iPhone. I don’t like the iPhone prices either, but there is one big difference today between iPhone and Pixel. The iPhone you buy today will very likely be able to run the version of iOS released four years from now, so you don’t need to buy a new iPhone in two years, you cannot say the same thing about Pixel.
The combination of the $150 price increase, Apple’s practice to support older models of iPhones and selling older models at lower prices has me considering for the first time a switch to iPhone. I value the ability to receive updates direct from the source of the operating system.
I prefer Android smartphones and I don’t want to switch, so I hope Google will make the changes I describe above. I also need to take a closer look at Android One, which may clean Android with updates from Google at a lower price. The bottom line is that Googe needs to know there is more to providing a premium phone than a price increase, and paying $800 for a phone that will only get operating system upgrades for two years makes no sense.
Civics Lesson
First, one needs to learn what history says it means to be an American. Next, one needs to decide what they believe it means to be an American. How consistent are your beliefs with history?
Next, one needs to determine what each political party claims it stands for and challenge the assumptions for how those claims are consistent with being an American and for progress.
Of course, the questions of whether progress is needed, desired, and how it looks needs to be decided, ultimately by each individual.
Overtime Baseball
The Cubs and Brewers are playing game 163 starting at 1 PM EST to determine who wins the NL Central division and who will have the best record in the National League and with it home field advantage through the NL portion of the playoffs.
On paper the game appears to come down to momentum versus experience. The Brewers have won seven straight to finish the season and force this game, while the Cubs have been in the playoffs the last three years and won the world series in 2016.
For me the Cub’s chances to win the game weigh heavily on Quintana’s ability to keep Lorenzo Cain off the bases so that he can pitch around Yelich. Cub’s need to hit and score runs early as the Brewer’s bullpen is superior and this most likely will turn in to a bullpen game early. The Brewer’s bullpen enables them to follow the same formula as the Royals did when they had their playoff runs.
Anxious to see how this turns out. While the Cubs at worse will end up with the second-best record in the NL, they go in to playoffs as the weakest team due to injury and the grind of playing on 40 of 41 days to end the season. In some ways this is a must win just to get a few days off, but I don’t think Maddon will manage in such a manner.
They Liked His Anger
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s recommendation for a full vote on Kavanaugh demonstrates the value of diversity. All the Republicans on the committee are men who identified with Kavanaugh’s anger. Lindsey Graham seemed to channel it the most. In that moment it no longer mattered whether Kavanaugh is qualified for the job (I don’t think he is) or guilty of sexual assault because by god they like the man just because he got pissed off! And that too is how we end up with Trump as President because enough voters liked him and didn’t care about his ability to actually do the job.
Senators have a constitutional responsibility to determine whether a person is competent to be a Supreme Court justice and not just like the candidates. The Senators who supported Kavanaugh have failed their duty.
Keep An Eye On The Watch
I think the smart watch market is fascinating. On one hand you have Apple, with one design and software innovation and on the other hand you have a multitude of watch designers producing a variety of different looking watches at different price points using comparatively mediocre Wear OS. It also highlights the advantage of designing your own chips because Wear OS has been constrained by slow chip development by Qualcomm.
BTW, if one is in the market for a Wear OS watch, wait until when watches with the new chips release later this year, early next. I know a number of new watches are being released to coincide with the new version of Wear OS coming next month, but I expect the new chip to provide better battery life and processing for the future.
The Right To Not Be Forgotten
Dave Winer has been writing about owning and archiving what one writes and publishes on the web for a very long time. I think the heart of the matter is that if one is to think of the web as a library there has to be a mechanism for it to be long-lived.
In other words, permanence. The interesting thing is that many people dislike the web’s permanence, and the European Union even has a law in place intended to enable people to disrupt that permanence.
If you do see the value, however, there needs to be permanent access to what is written and a way to get to it. Permanently storing files is a whole lot easier than permanent access.
Dave currently thinks Github may be as good as anything given that it is owned by Microsoft, a company one expects will be around for a while Still, given that it is a corporate asset, Github exists at the pleasure of Microsoft and not the public.
To Dave’s point, one thing I like about micro.blog is its support for Github. Micro.blog writes a copy of both the source markdown and the rendered HTML of what I write here to Github, and that provides one degree of backup. However, it gets even better because I use git to maintain a clone of that repository on my local computers, which provides me an easy backup copy of what I write on a computer I own.
The markdown is source for jekyll, which itself is an open source blog platform, and that source boils down to plain text files. BTW, jekyll itself works in this manner with Github pages which is good enough for many people, but I happen to like social layer and community that micro.blog provides.
Real Respect Not Displays
I don’t get the mindset of conservatives. They say things like they want small government and want government out of people’s lives and yet they want to dictate their beliefs to people with whom they disagree.
If America is about liberty, then one expressing that liberty by protesting is in fact a high form of patriotism.
Second, people need to understand that public displays of patriotism, which is what standing during a national anthem is, is done by non-democratic countries too. Such displays are not uniquely American. See above for what is uniquely American.
Finally, in my upbringing kneeling is a sign of reverence. One can make the argument that kneeling is even a higher display of respect than standing. If Colin and the other NFL players did something like turn their back, or lie down, or start break dancing THAT would be disrespectful.
Worse, what is most disrespectful to veterans is not voting. Actively working to prevent citizens from voting. Not challenging the President when he sends our military in to conflict. And not demanding that Congress uphold its constitutional responsibility to declare war. Wouldn’t making sure every vet gets the physical and mental health care they need be a true sign of respect? What is more respectful, actually caring about active military and veterans or puttinng on appearances of respect?
P.S. Go to any sporting event and you will find people walking, talking, and otherwise not paying attention during the national anthem.
My Micro.blog Wish
I think of micro.blog as a publishing platform, for two reasons. First, what I write is published to my blog. Second, what I write is published to other distribution channels, specifically for me Twitter and Facebook, but it could also include Medium and LinkedIn.
What would make micro.blog perfect for me is the ability to designate, at the time I am writing, to which distribution channels I want a particular item published to. All things that I write are appropriate for my blog, but some things I might only want to also be published to Twitter and yet other things I would prefer published to Facebook.
To me, the ability to control what gets published where, from the app in which I am writing, is particularly important if I were to publish to the LinkedIn and Medium channels that could be considered more “professional.”
Right now, cross-posting is all or nothing. Everything I write in micro.blog is cross posted to Twitter and Facebook and frankly some posts, like this one, don’t make sense for those audiences.
I recognize there are drawbacks to cross posting, specifically, it’s a write once experience meaning that edits don’t get re-published to Twitter and Facebook because there just isn’t a mechanism to do so.
Blogging Since 1999
I’ve ported a blog post I wrote in 2014 using Fargo to the site I am setting up using Jekyll and Netlify. The post is an historical account, current at that time, of the tools I used to write and host content on the web. I’ve been blogging since 1999, which means I am approaching 20 years of blogging.
Unfortunately, not all of my early content, almost 8 years worth, is accessible due to how that content was stored. However, there is access to the last decade worth of my writing, some of it good, most of it meh. I’ve pointed to the sites hosting those last 7 years.
Long Form Writing and Trying Out Netlify
Unlike most others here at micro.blog, I consider my micro.blog as my blog. The reason is that I distinguish blogs from long form writing and publishing on the Internet. For me, a blog post is 1 to 3 paragraphs and written in about 15 minutes or less.
I blog to share a thought or something of interest to me, I write to formulate and share ideas.
When I set up my micro.blog account and associated a personal blog domain to it, I decided that I would use my then current blog, Let’s Be Frank, for long form writing. The “broad” push to HTTPS is going to make that a problem because that blog is managed using an app written by Dave Winer called 1999.io, and it has a lot of Javascript libraries that I don’t think he is every going to convert to HTTPS.
So, stay there and maybe figure out how to convert to HTTPS or look somewhere else? I recently learned about Netlify from Jack Baty and after checking out its web site, I determined it has much of what I was looking for: low price, easy HTTPS implementation, and flexibility.
Netlify does not provide a Content Management System, but it integrates with Github to provide continuous deployment, so you can use static site generators like Jekyll for publishing content. Since I have a little experience with Jekyll, I decided to try out Netlify by following their Jekyll tutorial and it didn’t take me long to get a site up and available via HTTPS.
The upside with the approach I have so far is that I can write and publish content from any device, particularly my iPad. All you really need to do is add a file in the proper naming format to the posts folder of your Github repository. I’ve cloned the repository to Working Copy on my iPad and found a Drafts action that will save a new item to Working Copy and insert the proper header informatation that Jekyll requires.
Right now the new site is very much a work in progress and there may be changes. Oh, and I am aware of the irony of me writing this post here but this is is where you know me and I am not a stickler to such self determined rules.
The Overthrow Will Not Be By Force.
Too many people in the United States think our government will be overthrown by force when the reality is it is happening in just the opposite manner. The strong arguments against gun control in the U.S. is evidence of this, as the argument centers around needing to keep guns as protection against government oppression. The powers that be don’t need to take guns away, they just need us to keep arguing about them, which fossilizes idealogy and keeps attention away from what is really happening.
The constitution enables authoritarianism when Congress and the Supreme Court do not function in their jobs as overseers of the Presidency. When Congress and the Supreme Court simply align with a president due to party affliation, you have a dictator in practice.
Today the process nearly complete, and gerrymandering will seal the deal. Gerrymandering removes the one power citizens have, which is to vote. You don’t need to burn down the flag nor rip up the Constitution, all that is needed is idealogical compliance to what the Presidency wants.
Tolerance Is Fundamental To Freedom
Tolerance is fundamental to freedom. If we stop tolerating actions or opinions that we disagree with, you stop freedom, democracy disappears and is replaced by dictatorship. The irony is for the idea that kneeling during the national anthem is disrespectful and should not be tolerated, we are giving up the very freedom that too many gave their lives for.
You can not dictate respect. Dictating respect is counter to tolerance and is counterproductive because respect is earned, not given.
Do you really want freedom? If you do, it starts by tolerating those with whom you disagree and not treating them with contempt.
Drafts or Ulysses?
One thing I find frustrating about iOS are the number of apps that all seem to do the exact same thing. How do you decide on one over the other? An example is Drafts and Ulysses, both are good markdown editors but Drafts supports more automation. Last summer I was looking for a new editor and Ulysses came highly recommended, so I bought it, but then the company switched to a subscription model and that turned me off, I decided to not buy in to the subscription.
Then I learned about Drafts, and so I went and downloaded it and have used it to write some blog posts. To date I have mostly used it to write long posts for one site that only has a “basic” web-based editor. Of course, Drafts has now been recently upgraded and it too has a subscription model.
To me, it doesn’t make sense to have Ulysses and Drafts on my iPad, Drafts seems to able to do the job good enough. However, so far I have not seen an Action for sending text to Wordpress, which I find a bit surprising. Does anyone know of such an Action? The one in the Drafts directory appears to require components not part of Wordpress.com.
Micro Blogging versus Social Networks
You might think it too fine a point, but I think any blogging product requires the ability to edit what one has written. To me, editing is a fundamental difference between blogging and social networks because blogging is about permanence where as the social network timeline/newsfeed is a black hole.
To me, what makes micro blogging different from social networks like Twitter is the permance I describe above, and therefore editing should be a fundamental requirement for all micro blogging apps.
Gmail versus Inbox
Google has released the new version of Gmail, which I am checking out. I have been using, and like, Inbox mostly because how quickly I can use it to triage email. By triage I mean browse for messages I want to read and then quickly archiving all the remaining messages. No other app, including Gmail provides as easy a way to archive a group of messages.
The downside of Inbox is that it is very JavaScript heavy and therefore the web app performance can suffer. Another downside is that the app versions don’t look as good on larger screens such as on my 10.5 iPad Pro in landscape.
So, I am considering using Gmail on large screens and Inbox on small screens. However to decide that, I need to use the new Gmail for a while.