I’ve been receiving many “offers” from AT&T lately trying to get us to drop our landline and convert it to AT&T’s VoIP service. My speculation has been that AT&T wants to get rid of landlines as it is probably costing them money, and this article about what is going on in California appears to support that speculation. One of the single biggest problems I have with VoIP is with what happens when there is a power loss. Landlines continue functioning when the power goes down, Internet connections do not unless you have a UPS, and even if you do that could be for a short amount of time. The article states that AT&T already received relief of its Carrier of Last Resort obligation in Michigan. I won’t be surprised if sooner or later we get notice that they are dropping their landline service.
Smart Monitors On Faces
Despite reading more about the Apple Vision Pro, I have yet to warm up to the idea of strapping a headset on to my face, no matter the potential cost of the headset and the utility. I think back to the idea of one using notebook computers in meetings, many think that is rude or at the least too intrusive. While one can clearly take more detailed notes, there is a physical screen between oneself and other meeting participants. In this case tablets are more favorable because they can lie flat on table and be no more intrusive than a pad of paper.
While the Vision Pro does have a pass through mode that enables the wearer to see what is in front of them, it is obvious to others in the room that the wearer’s attention is not fully on them. Anything physically larger than regular glasses is going to send signals to others, just like the use of notebook computers in meetings and classrooms. Consequently in it’s current incarnation the Vision Pro is a very private device.
It’s true that over time the use of notebook computers has become more accepted and it happens now in nearly every meeting and probably every class in college, but that still doesn’t make it right. When Google first released Glass the debates about the social norms for their use started but never ended because the product really never gained acceptance, these social discussions, and probably laws, will need to restart. For example, I think it is worth serious discussion about whether one should ever be allowed to wear the Vision Pro on a plane, which is a place in which ones attention can mean life or death. Most expect Vision Pro to succeed mostly because it is from Apple, but even Apple is not immune to flops.
So, then, the question is at what price point and for what utility will the Vision Pro gain acceptance? Do you spend $1,000 or more on monitor on you desk? Some do, most do not. I think the price is going to have to be closer to $500 in order to generating real sales. I have no doubt that will happen, just like how 4K desktop monitors are affordable and thus dominant in sales. How long will it take for the price to come down, and might that be too long for the Vision Pro to gain acceptance? Money may be on Apple’s side, but we will see whether time is too.
Temperature way above normal for February, makes for a very nice day. More of the same for the upcoming week, but I doubt that Mother Nature doesn’t have a change in store.
Having seen more writing on the decline of local news, I sought out and found a link to an independent news site for the county that I live it. In a suburban area like where I live, I am not sure county equals local, I really would like new relating to my township and the immediately bordering cities. None the less, I checked out the site, and I don’t know whether it’s me or not, but I find the intense amount of graphics on the site to not be very professional. Most “news” sites I see online are loaded with ads and other graphics that make it heard to actual find and read the news, hence they become not worth my time.
Really good, and I think really important, column here by David Brooks in The Atlantic, The Zeitgeist of Doom. I think he correctly puts his finger on what we are experiencing right now in American society, a kind of peer pressure of negativity, that appears to be a badge of honor among both sides of the ideological and political spectrum. I confess to finding myself feeling this sense of doom, and worse the feeling there is nothing to be done. Here is the thing though, our pessimism is helping our opponents and does not actually make things better, it produces lose-lose results . So, not giving into negativity, focusing on being positive, recognizing much of life is better right now than it was 10, 20, 50 years ago, while at the same time being angry that so much more can be improved is an act of resistance.
I think the biggest argument that should be made to the American people is that you are being used. I get the feeling that everything is so bad that it might as well all be blown up, but every crater created by an explosion is eventually filled, so you better beware of what will come after everything is blown up as there are no guarantees it will be better for you! Take the red pill. It’s not good enough to just want change, to just oppose whatever is, we need to be able to know and communicate what is to go into the crater after the explosion. You can be certain there are those with power who definitely have plans for filling the crater.
It’s still morning and my gratitude list is full. Grateful for fresh fallen snow. Grateful I work from home so that I don’t have to drive in the snow for hours. Grateful to be able to walk in fresh snow.
If you know someone living in southeast Michigan today, be kind, they are likely hurting from the crushing defeat of the Detroit Lions to the San Francisco 49ers last night. Only 15 days now until pitchers and catchers report and the first spring training game is 24 days away.
Finally some blue skies and sunshine, if only for a brief moment this morning. A day in Michigan to get outdoors.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Pebble Creek this high. It’s the result of several days of rain and melting snow.
I had not thought much about the computer mouse and its slow moving extinction until I read this article from The Atlantic. The emergence of the real personal computing has diminished how much a mouse is needed or used for a great number of people. While I work at a desk with a mouse during work hours, my personal computing continues on for hours more without the need for a mouse, but still the tactile nature of the mouse that makes computing more personal endures whenever one touches a screen on a tablet or smartphone.
Today I was looking for a book in my home library and came across this, which caused me to chuckle in light of everyone posting pictures of their first Mac yesterday.
Now that I am annotating more PDFs using the Boox Note Air 3C I am looking for ways to make the annotations searchable as that is not what is produced by the Boox software. Today tried GetSearchablePDF that works fairly well, but is very expensive at $9 per 100 pages scanned. I wonder what cheaper and perhaps self-hosted solutions exist?
I bought the Boox Note Air 3C for the ability to better hand write notes in digital ink and to read with less eye strain. Reading and writing with any mobile device means you are going to need a way to get files on and off the mobile device. Curiously, Boox treats synchronization of the native notes apps different from annotations made with the native reading app. I’ve written about my experience with figuring out this synchronization over on my Daynotes site.
“The American media has spent a generation letting politicians lie about every stupid little thing, and the net effect was to make an authoritarian Big Lie possible.” -Jonathan V. Last, The Bulwark. In other words, the fourth estate enshrined by the First Amendment to preserve the Republic is probably the catalyst for the end of the Republic.
Reading Dave Winer’s recollection of first seeing and using the Mac on the 30th anniversary of its introduction has me reflecting on my first encounters with the Mac during my freshman year of college in 1984-85. My work study assignment was the undergraduate computer science lab that was for all practical purposes put together specifically to be the home for six of the newly minted Macs. The CS department used the lab for teaching an experimental class in Pascal, but also came equipped with MacWrite and MacPaint. I was immediately enamored by these little computers that I had the good fortune to use whenever there were no other students using them, and I lusted over them for all five years I was in school. The price for the Macs were well out of my price range as were the IBM PCs that I could buy on a student discount. The first computer that I purchased was an Atari 800XL during my sophmore year, which I used for programming classes via VT100 terminal emulation connection to a mainframe and for writing papers. After I got my first job I bought an Atari 1040ST, which mimics the Mac UI but cost much less. Finally I bought my first Mac, a Mac Mini in 2005.
Just a couple of turkeys hanging out in a tree.
Parting Ways With Evernote
Today I canceled my subscription and closed by account with Evernote, which most will think a trivial event. People stop using software all the time, except I’ve been using Evernote from the beginning that it first became available for Windows in 2008. In fact, I am pretty sure that I first used a beta version of the product perhaps as early as 2005. At the time it was introduced no company was really developing notetaking software, at least not for Windows. When first introduced the UI of EverNote had the form of a continual scroll of information “flagged” by date, in fact it could be my first experience with the newsfeed/stream UI now commonly used by social networking applications.
The closest resemblance EverNote had to any other product was the UI of the Newton OS that ran on Apple’s Newton Messagepad. The resemblance may have been intentional because EverNote was founded by Stepan Pachikov who with his company Paragraph International, lead the development of the handwriting recognition engine known as CalliGrapher, which was licensed by Apple for use with the Newton OS. EverNote’s resemblance to Newton definitely drew my attention to the product.
Pachikov brought Phil Libin onboard as CEO of Evernote (originally the product name had a capitalized N that was changed to lowercase by 2008) and Libin grew the company and the product into the well recognized, multi-platform product that most people know of it today. In my opinion what made Evernote attractive is that it centrally stored data (perhaps one of the first commercial client/server applications) that is accessible to client applications running on nearly every computing platform that I use. At a time when it was common to see applications that ran only on Mac or Windows, or iOS, Evernote ran any every single one of these platforms.
Of course, developing and then maintaining separate code bases for each platform is daunting, particularly if the application architecture was not explicitly developed for that use, and so over time bugs crept up that caused problems. The relatively fast growth of the product also lead to performance issues, and for some data loss. For me Evernote jumped the shark around 2013 when the company began licensing/selling products with Evernote branding, like socks, that had no relationship to the core product, while there were significant problems with the Evernote app. One year after Libin left Evernote the company stopped selling these products.
It might be said that Evernote began its path of decent soon after Libin left the company in 2015. Key developers started to leave the company and soon there seemed to be yearly rumors of the company going under. While many who I associated with stopped using it, by 2015 I had accumulated seven years of information in the application and I felt the yearly $60 subscription was worth my continued access to that information from all the devices I use. The Evernote web clipper had become my most valued tool of all the software I use and it is still the best browser web clipping application available particularly on mobile devices. Unlike most other apps, sharing to Evernote on iOS and Android captures the entire web page rather than just the link to the page.
So, despite the dismal outlook for the company and the app, I stayed committed to it, but last year it was acquired by Bending Spoons and they changed the subscription cost to $15 per month, which I decided was too expensive in light of what I pay in other software subscriptions. When the rumors of the demise of Evernote started appearing I began testing ways to export my information out of the application and import it into others. Two years ago I exported everything from Evernote to OneNote, which wasn’t perfect but good enough for me to find information should I need to. Last year I found I could also import my Evernote archive into Obsidian, which I completed last fall and from that point stopped storing new information in Evernote.
My yearly subscription with Evernote renews at the end of January, so my deadline to delete my data from Evernote and close my account was this past weekend. Deleting my notes was much more laborious than I would have preferred, as a deleted note is moved to Trash and then one has to empty the Trash in order to completely delete the note and I found that Trash emptying seemed to only handle about 100 notes or so at a time, particularly with the web application. The problem seems to be with the synchronization performance, even the web app syncs data with the browser local storage, and I suspect there is Javasript handling all of the API calls to tell Evernote’s servers to move and delete data.
I am obviously much more brand loyal than most other people, so it’s really a big deal for me personally to stop using a product after having used it for more than ten years. Obviously, my issue is not with the product itself but the subscription cost that most likely is driven by a decreasing number of subscribers. I do expect Evernote to eventually disappear within the next year or two. Going forward I am using Joplin to capture web clippings from Mac and Linux, tolerating the fact that sharing to Joplin with iPad only captures the link and not the web content. I have also started using Archivebox on my home network. I am using end to end encryption with Joplin and using OneDrive as the “hub” for storing/syncing the data in Joplin between my desktops and iPad. Unfortunately the Android version of Joplin does not synchronize well and I gave up even trying to use it on my Pixel 7a.
Skiers favorite fresh powder.
What separates the Boox Note Air 3C from competing products is that it has the Google Play store and is capable of running any Android application. Note however that eInk displays do not have the fast refresh of traditional tablet displays and therefore not all applications will run well, but apps like Readwise Reader and Google Calendar are a good fit. I narrowed my choices of which eInk device to buy to the Supernote Nomad and the Boox Note Air 3C and then picked the Note Air 3C because it can run any Android app whereas the Supernote is limited to only the Kindle app. The tradeoff is that reviews indicate Supernote has some functionality in its note taking capability that Boox does not have, and the Supernote Nomad is smaller and lighter than the Note Air 3C.