All posts filed under “Technology

Superheroes

One of the demos that lodged itself in my brain from the most recent Apple event was when Kevin Lynch used the Watch to remotely open a garage door to let in his daughter – who’d forgotten her key – while seeing a live feed from a security camera to confirm it was indeed opening. I finally twigged why I found this so compelling.

From the earliest days, technology has always been about giving ourselves extra abilities, about allowing us to transcend the limitations of our basic biology. Computers have played a dramatic role in this, but it’s always clear that we’re using them as a crutch; when we sit down in front of a desktop PC we’re acknowledging that we need this external technology’s help.

In making computers smaller – from the room to the desktop to the laptop to the pocket and now the wrist – I wonder if subconsciously we’ve been trying to make it less obvious that we need the help of other agents. There’s something about the nature of a smartwatch – not just that it’s discreet and unfamiliar as a computer-with-a-capital-c, but also that it’s permanently attached to you – that suggests the wearer has natively assimilated its powers.

With this demo, Lynch showed that not only could I see things happening on the other side of the world and physically reach across continents, but that I can do all that without apparently using a computer. Or at least, without as apparently using a computer as I would if I used a desktop PC, laptop, tablet or even smartphone.

We’ve always been obsessed with the idea of beings who can do fantastical things that we can’t. Gods. Superheroes.  And I think the reason this demo struck me is that as technology becomes less and less apparent, as it more seamlessly empowers us to reach across space and time and do ever more spectacular things, we become superheroes ourselves.

The thing is, Heath Robinson’s machines worked…

Having not heard of it till a tweet tipped me off, I reviewed one of the Brodit iPhone car mounts for the current issue of MacFormat. And when I say ‘one of’, I mean ‘one of a frankly bewildering range of’.

The system comprises made-to-measure holders for a vast range of devices – smartphones, tablets, sat-navs, walkie talkies and more – in a dazzling galaxy of different options – designed to be wired into a car, dumb, with cigarette-socket charging and so on – which are then mounted on a dizzying variety of different clips – some that attach to air vents, some that grip the A-pillar, etc – many of which are bespoke to a preposterous range of specific car models. Multiply it all together and I assume you’re in the ‘more options than there are atoms in the observable universe’ levels, which must make doing a stock-check a bit of a chore.

The actual products are good but they possess a distinct ‘man in a shed’ charm. The holder for my iPhone is ‘padded’, by which they mean ‘it’s hard plastic covered in a kind of flocking’. You can’t argue it’s not snug, though, and I don’t get the impression it would damage the iPhone even if it was to wear away.

The mounting plate I chose grips my car’s A-pillar; there are adhesive strips you can peel the backings off so that it’s stuck to the A-pillar as well as gripping it, but it grips completely without using them. To attach your holder to it, you screw it to the plate that protrudes. And when I say ‘screw it to the plate’, note that the plate has no pre-drilled screw holes. You’re literally screwing into solid – albeit soft – plastic.

The crazy thing is that while this might sound like the worst kind of stack-em-high-sell-em-cheap, bargain-bin rubbish, stuff with no engineering finesse or polish, the end result is one of the best car mounts I’ve ever used. I still mourn the passing of TomTom’s superb Car Kit mount, but while it was much slicker, neater and specific than the Brodit system, it still jiggled about a bit as you drove. With the Brodit, my iPhone behaves like it’s bolted directly to the superstructure – but the ball and socket joint means I can angle it just right.

Besides, there is something appealing about the man-in-a-shed honestly to the engineering here. It really does feel like a chap in overalls fashioned something on his workbench out of seasoned pine and recycled junk, got it to the stage where it did what he wanted and no more, and handed it to someone else saying ‘here, do that in plastic’.

It’s not frou-frou, it’s not flimsy, swoopy plastic bodywork, it’s not ‘available in a range of fun colours’. It holds your fucking iPhone.

Brodit detail

“Power users”

Even though I find the phrase a bit unpleasant – mostly because it’s used by willy-waving wankers, which is quite a trick if you can, as it were, pull it off – I’d probably call myself a power user. As it applies to me, that phrase means that I use my Mac a lot, that I use it quickly, confidently and productively, that I know lots of tricks and shortcuts to make my use of it even more productive, and that a sluggish computer would frustrate both me and my earning potential.

What I don’t need, as a power user, is power. My main Mac is a 2008 MacBook Pro, quite an ancient machine by tech standards, and much as I’d like to replace it with a 13″ Retina MacBook Pro, I can’t justify doing so when it works so very well. ‘Power’ to too many people means not just a fast CPU but a CPU based on the latest chip architecture for little reason other than the fact that it is. It means having Thunderbolt 2 even if what you attach to it is a printer. It means replaying the same worn-grooved ‘Apple has lost the plot’ record – the one we heard when Apple ditched the floppy disk, when the iPod didn’t have an FM radio, when the iPad didn’t have a USB port – when Apple announced a new laptop without an SD card slot.

CPU, GPU, super-fast interconnects and the like, though, are broadly irrelevant to me. Sure, on those occasions when I’m exporting video, I wish my MacBook Pro had more grunt, and I might be forced to upgrade it to keep me relevant as a tech writer. In general, though, I’d use it until one of us died.

And that’s because the ‘power’ my Mac has is responsiveness, and that comes both from a decent amount of RAM (though only 8GB, nothing extravagant) and because I long ago replaced the hard disk with an SSD.

You don’t need power to be a power user. And you don’t need to be a dick to be one either.

Photoshop’s effect on our gullibility

I remember seeing ads for Photoshop in a magazine in the nineties – fantastical photo montages of impossible scenes. Impossible as they were, though, I remember marvelling that I ‘couldn’t see the joins’. And that’s because as a child of the eighties, I was used to photo montage techniques in general being so ropey that unless you suspended your disbelief, it was painfully clear that they were faked.

I mention this because Photoshop (and its users) have become so good since then that today’s teenagers have probably never known a world in which utterly convincing but equally utterly false images can be conjured up with comparatively little effort.

What I can’t work out, though, is if the effect on our gullibility has been a positive one – that is, we’re aware that you can’t trust a single pixel of an image, and so always even just subconsciously question their veracity – or negative, both in that manipulated images are so ubiquitous that we just throw our hands up, and because we’re so ready to believe viral images that spread through social networks.

iOS feature request: AirPlay video stream locking

Much of what I watch on our television is streamed from my iPhone – usually from the iPlayer app, or from Air Video HD – via an Apple TV using AirPlay. In general, the system works wonderfully well, but there’s one major irritant. Both iPlayer and Air Video HD allow the stream to persist even when the phone is sleeping or when the app is ‘in the background’, and that’s great, of course, but the stream can get disrupted when using another app. I’m not daft enough to load YouTube and start browsing for other videos – of course they would take precedence over the existing background stream — but if I scroll past an autoplaying video on Facebook or Instagram, say, or tap on an image in Alien Blue that turns out to be a GIF, they’ll try to hijack the stream.

So I’d like some way of telling iOS ‘protect this video stream over AirPlay; play other video content on the iPhone itself’, but I don’t know what the UI would be for this. There’s a temptation to add another switch to the AirPlay overlay, similar to the Mirroring switch, but then that’s a system-wide control rather than app-specific. There again, if I understand correctly, the streaming will be handed-off from an app to a system-level process anyway, so maybe that’s not a bad thing; maybe a ‘protect current stream’ toggle isn’t a bad solution.

It may be that solving this problem is just too inelegant, and that may be why it hasn’t been solved yet. But if Apple does, I’ll be delighted.

A1242

One of the first features I commissioned as editor of MacFormat was on ergonomics, and one of the pieces of advice Shelby gave in it really resonated, not least because it had simply never occurred to me. She pointed out that the numeric keypads which cling to the right hand side of most keyboards are bad ergonomics, since it forces [those of] us [who are right-handed] to stretch out to the right to use a mouse.

Since that Damascene moment over two years ago, and given that I use the numpad so infrequently I wouldn’t mourn its loss, I’ve been on the lookout for a keyboard like the one you see above. It’s taken me so long to find one because Apple only made them – bundling them by default with Early 2009 iMacs – for a short period. You can find US-layout ones comparatively easily – I wouldn’t mind ‘losing’ £, but I’d hugely miss the UK-layout Return key – and of course the Bluetooth version is still made so getting one of those would be trivial.

However, I use a KVM and also don’t especially like feeding even rechargeable batteries to a keyboard, so I both wanted and needed a wired one. I finally bought one (in essentially new condition) by the simple expedient of setting up a search for its model number – A1242 –plus ‘Apple’ and ‘UK’ in eBay and then subscribing to the results in RSS. (Did you know you can turn any eBay search results page into an RSS feed by adding &_rss=1 to the end of the URL? Here’s the URL for my search if you want one of these keyboards too.)

Although ergonomics was the motivator for getting this keyboard, however, there are other reasons I love it. There’s always something pleasing to me about using just-enough-but-no-more to do something, and this keyboard is a writer’s keyboard.

It’s also so small and light that if I pause for a moment in writing, my pinkies can stretch out easily to lightly grip the sides and, with my thumbs resting on the bottom lip, I can nudge or twist the keyboard by a few fractions of a millimetre so it’s in the perfect position for typing.

It’s a lovely little thing, and I’m delighted I’ve finally found one.

Early adopters

I often hear repeated the assertion that early adopters specifically want to be on the cutting edge, that they draw much of their delight from technology from being an early adopter in and of itself.

(I was prompted to write this after noticing it in this excellent piece on the end of trickle-down in technology adoption – which is rightly being recommended by basically everyone online – but I’m not singling it out in particular. It’s great. Read it. Like, after this.)

I wonder: how true is it? How true is it that one of the driving factors for early adopters is only and in the abstract that they want to be on the cutting edge? I’m sure it plays a part – the bragging rights, the attention it brings and the way your opinion has currency and heft because you actually have the thing that everyone’s talking and curious about – and I recognise some of that in me. I’m an early adopter, to be sure, though possibly more on the ‘visionary’ slice of the graph linked to above rather than ‘technology enthusiast’.

For me, though, having new technology early isn’t about the mere act of having it early – I buy or review because I’m excited about it and more importantly it’s because I’m curious to see for myself what this new tech is, how it fits into my life and how it might fit into the lives of others.

Perhaps, though, I’m just conflating the ‘tech enthusiasts’ and ‘visionaries’ slices of Moore’s chart into a broad ‘early adopter’; it certainly seems so if you stick closely to his definitions. In other words, I might call myself an early adopter, but I’m not the kind of hardcore early early adopter who prizes adopting early above or at least equal to the tech that’s being adopted. If true, though, I don’t know any of these ‘tech enthusiasts’ who conform to Moore’s definition, neither in meat space or cyber space. Do you?

What to do when a drive won’t mount (hint: nothing)

tl;dr version: An external disk wouldn’t mount; I panicked and tried to fix it, then I just gave up and it fixed itself – specifically, the fsck_hfs daemon fixed it for me.

Yesterday, I rebooted my the Mac mini in my office into Windows to play some games, then when I rebooted back into OS X, my Drobo wouldn’t mount.

The status lights on it were all normal, and the Drobo Dashboard (which coincidentally I think failed with ‘missing components’ necessitating reinstalling) reported it was healthy too, but while the drive showed in System Information and in the Disk Utility tree, if I tried to mount it it just reported that it couldn’t, and suggested that I should try to repair it.

I was a little nervous of doing this since a Drobo uses an unusual disk structure, but its own support documents say you should indeed try repairing the disk if it fails to mount. (It’s not actually surprising, since the Drobo’s unusual system should be entirely hidden from the Mac; so far as the Mac is concerned, it should be just like any other disk.)

Disk Utility, however, reported that the disk was unrepairable. Now, I tried connecting it using USB 2.0 (rather than FireWire 800), and connecting it to another Mac, but still, no dice. I was beginning to resign myself to buying Disk Warrior to laboriously reconstruct the directory structures, but I wasn’t quite done troubleshooting yet.

My next step was to connect it to yet another Mac, and now I got a faint glimmer of hope. This was my wife’s MacBook Air, which is still running OS X 10.9; both my Macs had been upgraded to 10.10. Clicking on iStat Menus, I saw that the fsck_hfs process was running, taking up a lot of the CPU. This is a background process that checks and repairs disks, so with nothing to lose — and knowing that a Drobo support document I read earlier said that if fsck is running, let it complete — I just left it and went to watch telly.

I came back a couple of hours later, and boom; the Drobo was mounted on the desktop of my wife’s Mac. Now, one detail I omitted earlier was I had noticed that when the Drobo was connected to either of my Yosemite Macs, a process called diskarbitrationd grabbed a whole chunk of the CPU. Googling it suggested it’s a process just concerned with mounting disks, so I had thought it was getting stuck because it couldn’t mount the Drobo. I can’t find information to suggest diskarbitrationd is a successor to or incorporates the repair elements of fsck, but it’s possible that had I just left the Drobo connected to the Mac mini when I first noticed the problem that it would have repaired itself there too. I’m a little annoyed that the Mac apparently had the ability to repair the disk, but loading Disk Utility and clicking Repair – the obvious troubleshooting process – failed with no hint that an invisible, background process was actually capable of doing it, not least because if you know less than I do, you’d just assume that your data was gone, and either start a lengthy restore process or start spending money on new disks.

(The data on the Drobo – mostly our iTunes Library – was backed up, online, to Livedrive, but the idea of downloading 4TB data, even on a fibre connection, wasn’t one to fill me with delight.)

I’m pretty paranoid about backup and data security, but this episode was a reminder that however you protect your data it’s never absolutely safe; all you’re doing is reducing the risk. The Drobo system allows for a single disk (or, depending on your configuration, two disks) to fail mechanically without losing any data – just pop out the duff disk and slot in a new one, something I’ve done in the past – but as I was reminded even this doesn’t ensure the data is secure, since it only protects against one particular (albeit major) source of data loss.

It’s important to point out that I believe the Drobo system itself was entirely blameless in all of this; I think the fault was one that could have affected a simple single-disk USB drive, and would have been fixed in the same way.

Windows Phone

Worth-reading refection on the stagnation of Windows Phone and its app ecosystem from The Verge:

I’ve always been slightly frustrated at the lack of Windows Phone apps, but as the gaps have been gradually filled, a new frustration has emerged: dead apps. Developers might be creating more and more Windows Phone apps, but the top ones are often left untouched with few updates or new features. That’s a big problem for apps like Twitter that are regularly updated on iOS and Android with features that never make it to Windows Phone. My frustration boiled over during the World Cup this year, as Twitter lit up with people talking about the matches. I felt left out using the official Windows Phone Twitter app because it didn’t have a special World Cup section that curated great and entertaining tweets, or country flags for hashtags.

It’s a real shame. I’ve always liked Windows Phone and felt it deserved wildly more success than it got. I’ve never owned one but always really wanted to; there’s a crispness and an elegance to the OS, and a terrific balance both between control and customisability, and between productivity and playfulness, that I flat-out adore.

Although for many people checking off Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Skype and WhatsApp is likely all the third party app diversity they need, I’d reach for the same examples as Tom Warren does when complaining about the moribund ecosystem – Dark Sky and Citymapper. (I’d throw in Tweetbot too, of course.) These are astonishingly good apps, apps that take highly chaotic and complex systems and present them in a clear, directly actionable way.

It always struck me – from a position of ignorance, on the sidelines – that Microsoft could have, in the early days, just simply bought success for Windows Phone. Huge bounties for developers, free licensing of the OS, massive campaigns, breaks and incentives for carriers and retailers – it’s done some of these, but never, it seems, with enough commitment or at sufficient scale. It’s like the company didn’t think the mobile market was a prize worth fighting for.

Success, of course, can be defined in many ways – Apple, for example, seems perfectly happy to count revenue share in the smartphone market rather than market share, and that’s understandable – but it’s hard to imagine Microsoft, especially Microsoft, defining Windows Phone’s situation now as a success. And the time when it could have just bought success is probably past for this round.

Update: When I posted this to Facebook, my old editor Ian Betteridge made a typically astute comment: “The thing to remember is that Microsoft had also been clobbered by the DoJ and EU for things like tying, bundling, etc. Windows Phone is basically what you get when a company which got used to being able to throw its weight around suddenly can no longer do so.” I wonder how explicitly that’s true or whether it just permeated the culture at such a fundamental level that it coloured everyone’s attitude to growth and opportunities without them even realising it?

Apple eMate in a café

On finding and protecting the things you like to do (and what to do next)

I’m having a terrific time writing and doing photography for my Think Retro column at Macworld. My latest is on how computers, austere and anodyne today, used to be much chirpier – literally.

The thing I always forget I love till I pick up my eMate again is the noises it makes. As you use the stylus to select things on the screen, little confirmatory noises sound, and the joyous thing is that they’re not the same sound. The effect, as you tap about the screen to format a document and send it by fax, say, is that you get a cheery burble of “beek,” “bik,” “bok” rather than the same “click,” “click,” “click” as you’d expect on other systems. It’s emblematic of a much more human, much friendlier approach to operating systems than any other I can think of.

You can read the whole thing at http://www.macworld.com/article/2856351.

It’s a funny thing; life seems inevitably and inexorably to lead to the present when you look back at it, but you had no idea where it was heading at the time. I just used to like old Apple stuff, and so bought it if it was cheap and I wanted it – with the result that now even I’m surprised by how much stuff I have from which I can draw for Think Retro.

Today, then, I have a regular writing gig sharing an enthusiasm with others who seem to be enjoying it. I’ve always struggled to know what I want to do with my career, and you often hear the advice that you should identify the things you enjoy doing, then work out how you can turn them into a job. I suspect I rejected that at some subconscious level for two reasons. First, it seemed too easy; surely a job was a necessary evil to be endured? It should be arduous; it’s called ‘work’. Worse, I had come to dislike the Confucian quote ‘Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life’ because experience suggested to me there was no surer way to leech the delight out of a hobby than to bury it under a thick layer of work apparatus and office life.

I think I probably got it wrong – thrice. I was slow to recognise the things I actually enjoyed doing, had a deep-seated and unhealthy attitude to work, and needed to get much, much better at translating my curiosity and aptitude for a broad range of subjects into money. Let’s see if I can get better at learning from my mistakes in 2015.