What if we have the Muses wrong? What if they are cursed to forever have lesser men claim their work and get relegated to the acknowledgments?
Thursday, March 16, 2023
Thursday, January 30, 2020
grounding experience
I bought a Clipper Creek HCS-40 charging station for my BMW i3 about five years ago and it worked continuously and reliably for about four of those years. As of this week, it appears to be working reliably again.
It started throwing intermittent power faults a couple years ago. Its user interface reminds me of an old HP inkjet printer I once beat to death. That printer indicated all status with a single LED. The Clipper Creek has four. One means that the station itself has power. One means that the car is charging. One means that there has been a power fault. One means that there has been a charging fault. A variety of exceptional conditions are indicated with patterns of blinks by one or more of these lights.
The manual says that 'power fault' means that my house wiring has a fault. That's it. It says nothing detailed about what particular blinking sequences mean. The intermittent power faults thrown by my unit became more regular and then turned into a series of blinking codes. I took the unit apart, drained water that had accumulated inside it, drilled a weep hole, and replaced some corroded ground screws. It worked fine for a few days and went back to a state of permanent power fault. The blinking codes are irrelevant. They mean warranty replacement or Congratulations! A Blinking Unit That You May Keep. Clipper Creek offered no advanced diagnostics over the telephone. They did offer to have me send a thing the size of a cat sarcophagus back to HQ for repair at my expense. I declined.
My charging station is mounted outside on the wall of my freestanding workshop building. The workshop is connected to the back of the house with underground conduit. The service to that conduit runs the length of the house from the panel at the front. I gutted the house in 2018 and replaced the main panel and nearly every wire in the house. The utility replaced the meter and replaced the lines from the street at that time. I did not really want to revisit any of it.
While the Clipper Creek was out of commission, I charged the car using the L1 charger that came with the car. It never reported a power problem when using the same electric service in the workshop.
My theories were that the Clipper Creek had either lost its mind or there was a loose ground or neutral somewhere. I couldn't find one. I expected I would replace the Clipper Creek but I was in no hurry because the cost of a new EVSE is a notable fraction of the total cost of the electricity it will ever dispense and because I already had holes in my outside workshop wall for the Clipper Creek.
About a year before we remodeled, the water utility replaced our 3/4" lead service line with a 1" copper service line. They brought it into the house and broke up the concrete and soil in the basement right under the electric service panel where our grounding rod was. They installed a pressure regulator beneath the bonding wire that tied our copper domestic water line to ground. The regulator had a threaded union wrapped with teflon tape. The combination of dielectric union and disturbed grounding rod meant that the house apparently had a very marginal ground.
I noticed that whole situation only because the charging station came alive just for a day. I jumped on the forums and found a suggestion that Keurig machines especially might generate enough noise to confuse the charging station. Clipper Creek tech support made the same Keurig suggestion to me on the phone. If I had a Keurig, I would probably deserve this punishment. I don't but I did start spending hours at the service panel flipping circuits on and off to see if I could poke the charger back to life again.
A culprit may have been a Smarthome-branded Insteon lightswitch in the basement that had recently absolutely lost its mind. It was the only lightswitch left in the house from before the remodel. All of the other Smarthome stuff had died years earlier and been thrown away. In fact, this switch had stopped working as a switch years earlier and I just didn't care. I pulled its local disconnect and the car charger came to life.
As part of the remodel, my wife made me promise that no light switch would cost more than about two dollars. That was one of the best decisions I made. I use these.
Everything I ever bought from Smarthome turned out to be like something from Radio Shack laundered through the SkyMall catalog. I regret every single transaction.
As for Clipper Creek, I'm happy my unit is working again. I'm happy its Power Fault LED turned out to be right. I'm happy the fix didn't involve me re-trenching my back yard. I'm disappointed in a user interface that did nothing to build confidence. The EVSE LED is no more persuasive than the LED on a handyman's outlet tester that says ground is fine. I've been inside my HCS-40. Like all L2 EVSE, it's a simple product built around a microcontroller, a contactor, and some sense transformers. The cordset is probably the most expensive component. I suggest that Clipper Creek could bundle their same power fault algorithm (whatever it is) in their existing microcontroller architecture into a cheap plug-in tester with a 1-line LCD to prequalify installations and troubleshoot existing installations. They already sell a dummy EVSE tester, so it's a small leap. The majority of electricians doing residential installs own little test equipment and bring even less on calls. With manufacturers like Clipper Creek now offering plug-based EVSE, the substantial majority of EVSE installs will be done by handypersons and homeowners who have none.
It started throwing intermittent power faults a couple years ago. Its user interface reminds me of an old HP inkjet printer I once beat to death. That printer indicated all status with a single LED. The Clipper Creek has four. One means that the station itself has power. One means that the car is charging. One means that there has been a power fault. One means that there has been a charging fault. A variety of exceptional conditions are indicated with patterns of blinks by one or more of these lights.
The manual says that 'power fault' means that my house wiring has a fault. That's it. It says nothing detailed about what particular blinking sequences mean. The intermittent power faults thrown by my unit became more regular and then turned into a series of blinking codes. I took the unit apart, drained water that had accumulated inside it, drilled a weep hole, and replaced some corroded ground screws. It worked fine for a few days and went back to a state of permanent power fault. The blinking codes are irrelevant. They mean warranty replacement or Congratulations! A Blinking Unit That You May Keep. Clipper Creek offered no advanced diagnostics over the telephone. They did offer to have me send a thing the size of a cat sarcophagus back to HQ for repair at my expense. I declined.
My charging station is mounted outside on the wall of my freestanding workshop building. The workshop is connected to the back of the house with underground conduit. The service to that conduit runs the length of the house from the panel at the front. I gutted the house in 2018 and replaced the main panel and nearly every wire in the house. The utility replaced the meter and replaced the lines from the street at that time. I did not really want to revisit any of it.
While the Clipper Creek was out of commission, I charged the car using the L1 charger that came with the car. It never reported a power problem when using the same electric service in the workshop.
My theories were that the Clipper Creek had either lost its mind or there was a loose ground or neutral somewhere. I couldn't find one. I expected I would replace the Clipper Creek but I was in no hurry because the cost of a new EVSE is a notable fraction of the total cost of the electricity it will ever dispense and because I already had holes in my outside workshop wall for the Clipper Creek.
About a year before we remodeled, the water utility replaced our 3/4" lead service line with a 1" copper service line. They brought it into the house and broke up the concrete and soil in the basement right under the electric service panel where our grounding rod was. They installed a pressure regulator beneath the bonding wire that tied our copper domestic water line to ground. The regulator had a threaded union wrapped with teflon tape. The combination of dielectric union and disturbed grounding rod meant that the house apparently had a very marginal ground.
I noticed that whole situation only because the charging station came alive just for a day. I jumped on the forums and found a suggestion that Keurig machines especially might generate enough noise to confuse the charging station. Clipper Creek tech support made the same Keurig suggestion to me on the phone. If I had a Keurig, I would probably deserve this punishment. I don't but I did start spending hours at the service panel flipping circuits on and off to see if I could poke the charger back to life again.
A culprit may have been a Smarthome-branded Insteon lightswitch in the basement that had recently absolutely lost its mind. It was the only lightswitch left in the house from before the remodel. All of the other Smarthome stuff had died years earlier and been thrown away. In fact, this switch had stopped working as a switch years earlier and I just didn't care. I pulled its local disconnect and the car charger came to life.
As part of the remodel, my wife made me promise that no light switch would cost more than about two dollars. That was one of the best decisions I made. I use these.
Everything I ever bought from Smarthome turned out to be like something from Radio Shack laundered through the SkyMall catalog. I regret every single transaction.
As for Clipper Creek, I'm happy my unit is working again. I'm happy its Power Fault LED turned out to be right. I'm happy the fix didn't involve me re-trenching my back yard. I'm disappointed in a user interface that did nothing to build confidence. The EVSE LED is no more persuasive than the LED on a handyman's outlet tester that says ground is fine. I've been inside my HCS-40. Like all L2 EVSE, it's a simple product built around a microcontroller, a contactor, and some sense transformers. The cordset is probably the most expensive component. I suggest that Clipper Creek could bundle their same power fault algorithm (whatever it is) in their existing microcontroller architecture into a cheap plug-in tester with a 1-line LCD to prequalify installations and troubleshoot existing installations. They already sell a dummy EVSE tester, so it's a small leap. The majority of electricians doing residential installs own little test equipment and bring even less on calls. With manufacturers like Clipper Creek now offering plug-based EVSE, the substantial majority of EVSE installs will be done by handypersons and homeowners who have none.
Sunday, September 1, 2019
long term
The UN IPCC estimated recently that there are about ten years left to avert a major climate catastrophe. That's twice as long as I have now owned my 2014 BMW i3 electric car. With that in mind, here begins the long-term review:
I bought an early i3 in 2014 and wrote a contemporary review. At the time, I thought it was a great 25 thousand dollar car looking for a way to break out of its introductory 50 thousand dollar pricing. I think I was about half right. The price never did fall but BMW steadily increased the range with denser batteries at the same price.
In short, the car works. It does all the things it could be expected to do and it solves the problems it could have been expected to solve. It's an extrapolation of my experience with a 2004 Prius. That car is still running on its original battery with no hybrid-specific maintenance in 200000 miles.
The i3 does not solve the problems that it cannot solve. It is several feet shorter than the car it replaced but not usefully narrower. It is, therefore, never in traffic. It is the traffic. It has cameras and computers that let it parallel park itself but it does not solve the problem that parking is killing cities.
The way to think about the i3 is not as an electric car. It's an interurban car. Its electric motor, battery pack, carbon fiber frame, and thermoplastic body panels just solve a bunch of packaging and noise problems. The interurban car builders at the end of the 19th century came to similar conclusions about electric, though they built for rails.
The plastic interurban family car pod is a retro-futuristic vision. Our pod goes to Annapolis or Baltimore and back, cities served by original electric DC interurban railways, but not Frederick or Richmond without a charge or use of the gas range extending motor.
This is the part where I might say that the electric drive train is low maintenance. That's true, though the on-board charger did melt once under warranty and was replaced with no trouble. One of the little strings that holds up the rear parcel shelf broke. The enormous lightweight windshields crack easily and few shops want to hear about replacing a windshield in a carbon fiber car. Of all the fragile and moving pieces that make up a car, the drivetrain is just a part. The fact that the i3 has no CD player, rear speakers, or operable rear windows will probably color my perceptions of its reliability just as much as its electric drivetrain.
In the long term, a set of four tires for the car costs a cargo bike. Electricity works. What doesn't work is cars. If you are shopping for a replacement car, consider eliminating that car. If you need to buy yourself a couple of years to figure that all out, consider a used BMW i3.
I bought an early i3 in 2014 and wrote a contemporary review. At the time, I thought it was a great 25 thousand dollar car looking for a way to break out of its introductory 50 thousand dollar pricing. I think I was about half right. The price never did fall but BMW steadily increased the range with denser batteries at the same price.
In short, the car works. It does all the things it could be expected to do and it solves the problems it could have been expected to solve. It's an extrapolation of my experience with a 2004 Prius. That car is still running on its original battery with no hybrid-specific maintenance in 200000 miles.
The i3 does not solve the problems that it cannot solve. It is several feet shorter than the car it replaced but not usefully narrower. It is, therefore, never in traffic. It is the traffic. It has cameras and computers that let it parallel park itself but it does not solve the problem that parking is killing cities.
The way to think about the i3 is not as an electric car. It's an interurban car. Its electric motor, battery pack, carbon fiber frame, and thermoplastic body panels just solve a bunch of packaging and noise problems. The interurban car builders at the end of the 19th century came to similar conclusions about electric, though they built for rails.
The plastic interurban family car pod is a retro-futuristic vision. Our pod goes to Annapolis or Baltimore and back, cities served by original electric DC interurban railways, but not Frederick or Richmond without a charge or use of the gas range extending motor.
This is the part where I might say that the electric drive train is low maintenance. That's true, though the on-board charger did melt once under warranty and was replaced with no trouble. One of the little strings that holds up the rear parcel shelf broke. The enormous lightweight windshields crack easily and few shops want to hear about replacing a windshield in a carbon fiber car. Of all the fragile and moving pieces that make up a car, the drivetrain is just a part. The fact that the i3 has no CD player, rear speakers, or operable rear windows will probably color my perceptions of its reliability just as much as its electric drivetrain.
In the long term, a set of four tires for the car costs a cargo bike. Electricity works. What doesn't work is cars. If you are shopping for a replacement car, consider eliminating that car. If you need to buy yourself a couple of years to figure that all out, consider a used BMW i3.
Monday, August 5, 2019
twiti
In the months that followed the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, I thought about something concrete I could do for gun control. Local politicans here in DC have passed about as much legislation as we can manage post-Heller. Some local pols have worried aloud about the menace of 3D-printed guns. I worried that this fear will manifest itself not in bans on gun possession independent of provenance but in restrictions on hobby fabrication equipment.
On 10 July 2019 -- less than a month before Connor Betts murdered 9 and injured dozens in Dayton with his rifle and drum magazine, a litter activist found this retail packaging for a cheap Glock-compatible drum magazine in a DC street can.
Whatever the specter of homemade 3D-printed guns was going to be, FedEx seems prepared to deliver something wilder.
I woke up thinking that the answer is ban self-loading firearms. A year ago, I would have packaged that up into one or two-hundred-odd characters and said so on twitter. Today, after the President of the United States blamed mental illness, video games, and online hate for the massacres in Toledo and El Paso, I thought the better first step was to quit twitter.
I have lots of other ideas that could have been packaged into little twitter message confections but it's all obvious. The concrete thing you can do is vote and you can't do that on twitter.
On 10 July 2019 -- less than a month before Connor Betts murdered 9 and injured dozens in Dayton with his rifle and drum magazine, a litter activist found this retail packaging for a cheap Glock-compatible drum magazine in a DC street can.
Please, people, do not put your household trash in public cans pic.twitter.com/kITBTD58Qs— Julie Lawson (@srfrjulie) July 10, 2019
Whatever the specter of homemade 3D-printed guns was going to be, FedEx seems prepared to deliver something wilder.
I woke up thinking that the answer is ban self-loading firearms. A year ago, I would have packaged that up into one or two-hundred-odd characters and said so on twitter. Today, after the President of the United States blamed mental illness, video games, and online hate for the massacres in Toledo and El Paso, I thought the better first step was to quit twitter.
I have lots of other ideas that could have been packaged into little twitter message confections but it's all obvious. The concrete thing you can do is vote and you can't do that on twitter.
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
martin luther style
My latest hundred or so dollars to Apple for developer signing certificates has finished evaporating and the apps on my kids' ipads are now non-functional. The answer, obviously, is the one Steve Jobs gave while still in corporeal form: web apps. Alas, you can't be a prophet in your own house, your own town, or perhaps even the whole state of California where good web apps are concerned.
I used to use Cordova to bridge the gap and I still admire the framework mightily. Most of my apps were essentially only a manifest (and Apple's private key) away from happy functioning on my kids' machines. The latter point proves sticker than the former.
I've gone all Martin Luther and nailed my complaints to the wall. My biggest complaints about audio in web apps is that backgrounding and sleep are broken after more than ten years even for trusted apps pinned to the home page. OK. iPads now permanently mounted to the walls. They're on forever. They never sleep and they never multitask. They run a full screen web page. If the Apple ecosystem hasn't improved in ten years, there seems little hope now. This post is instead about two great devices that make this ecosystem go.
The first is the Redpark combo gigabit ethernet / charge over lightning / PoE box. My iPads are delightfully WiFi-free and always charged. The box fits in a 2-gang wall box behind the iPad. It just works like magic. Apple should be ashamed that they do not sell this box. Seriously.
The second is the iPad 'Windfall' wall mount from Heckler Design. You wouldn't guess that there are many different ways to fold sheet metal into a tablet mount. There apparently are. Just as there are a surprising number of ways to build an essentially all-glass tablet and have most of them suck, so it is with tablet mounts. The Windfall delights. The iPad mounts easily. The mount includes enough space for a POE adapter to be tucked inside for flush installs. The wall-mounted back bracket is drilled with the typical VESA holes and also for the holes on a 2-gang wall box, which is how mine are mounted.
In a more perfect device union, the Redpark box might have some GPIO and support WebUSB in addition to Ethernet, but it is hard to imagine such a box winning Apple's seal of approval. If Apple were the kind of firm likely to support the kind of user empowerment represented by WebUSB, I probably wouldn't need to nail iPads to the wall in the first place.
A Heckler mount and a Redpark adapter together cost more than some nice Android tablets, some refurbished iPads, and some dedicated PoE-enabled industrial touch screens on clearance. They made sense for me since I already had the iPads and the actual iPad user experience with full-screen Safari seems unbeatable for less than very silly money. If these iPads die prematurely from running non-stop then I'll probably replace them with more of the same.
I used to use Cordova to bridge the gap and I still admire the framework mightily. Most of my apps were essentially only a manifest (and Apple's private key) away from happy functioning on my kids' machines. The latter point proves sticker than the former.
I've gone all Martin Luther and nailed my complaints to the wall. My biggest complaints about audio in web apps is that backgrounding and sleep are broken after more than ten years even for trusted apps pinned to the home page. OK. iPads now permanently mounted to the walls. They're on forever. They never sleep and they never multitask. They run a full screen web page. If the Apple ecosystem hasn't improved in ten years, there seems little hope now. This post is instead about two great devices that make this ecosystem go.
The first is the Redpark combo gigabit ethernet / charge over lightning / PoE box. My iPads are delightfully WiFi-free and always charged. The box fits in a 2-gang wall box behind the iPad. It just works like magic. Apple should be ashamed that they do not sell this box. Seriously.
The second is the iPad 'Windfall' wall mount from Heckler Design. You wouldn't guess that there are many different ways to fold sheet metal into a tablet mount. There apparently are. Just as there are a surprising number of ways to build an essentially all-glass tablet and have most of them suck, so it is with tablet mounts. The Windfall delights. The iPad mounts easily. The mount includes enough space for a POE adapter to be tucked inside for flush installs. The wall-mounted back bracket is drilled with the typical VESA holes and also for the holes on a 2-gang wall box, which is how mine are mounted.
In a more perfect device union, the Redpark box might have some GPIO and support WebUSB in addition to Ethernet, but it is hard to imagine such a box winning Apple's seal of approval. If Apple were the kind of firm likely to support the kind of user empowerment represented by WebUSB, I probably wouldn't need to nail iPads to the wall in the first place.
A Heckler mount and a Redpark adapter together cost more than some nice Android tablets, some refurbished iPads, and some dedicated PoE-enabled industrial touch screens on clearance. They made sense for me since I already had the iPads and the actual iPad user experience with full-screen Safari seems unbeatable for less than very silly money. If these iPads die prematurely from running non-stop then I'll probably replace them with more of the same.
Friday, December 15, 2017
computing, again
I wrote a lot of words two years ago about the search for a computer for my daughter. That search
ended with a 12" Macbook running Chrome and a Raspberry Pi. They work fine for her, though
I wished for a machine that was a cross between the Macbook and a convertible Chromebook.
Apple introduced the iPad Pro in the meantime and they have even refreshed it once since. It may not be exactly a viable hybrid of the Macbook and convertible Chromebook, but it is probably at least the arithmetic mean of the two.
I dinged Apple in 2015 for missing WebRTC, WebMIDI, packaged web apps, and some other
Chrome goodies. Apple delivered on WebRTC and even has a thing they call multitasking now. My version of LOGO runs in Safari adequately and even works with the Apple Pencil.
Would I buy my daughter an iPad Pro today? No. It basically sucks at computering. Offline web apps still suck and web pages saved to the home screen aren't just the second-class citizens that regular web pages are -- they are some kind of third class entity. Safari is now happy to use the camera to take pictures of your credit card and auto-fill web forms for you, but has matched none of Chrome's progress in talking to fun things like little robots or craft cutting machines like those from Silhouette using WebBluetooth and WebUSB.
Fortunately, my daughter's rig will probably last another three years. I'm in the market myself now and I find that I want most of the same things a child should expect. I have been struggling with some vision problems and I can't decide if I should upgrade from my 13" Macbook Pro to a new 15" machine or get a smaller touchscreen machine that I can put my face closer to. I think I would love a convertible 13" Macbook Pro.
I already own a 9.7" iPad Pro with a Smart Keyboard. It totally sucks at computering. It's such a bad computer that it moved me to tears this afternoon. Its hardware is fantastic. LTE is seamless. Its keyboard is pretty great if you can learn to live without the escape key. Its speech-to-text is fantastic. Its web browser is easily in the top three. But it's just phenomenally user hostile. It hates me. I'm nothing more than a sack of meat capable of holding a credit card up to its camera. A Mac lets me drag a song out of iTunes and into Safari. iOS turns that drag out of Music into a hyperlink into the iTunes store. The iPad Pro is almost exactly the philosophical opposite of the One Laptop Per Child OLPC.
It's so bad that it makes me wonder if anyone left in Cupertino ever actually had a good computer. Are the Macbook Pros built to be good computers, or do they merely fail to prevent happy computing? An oversight, perhaps?
I think the right answer is to use Cordova to build a WebKit-based computing environment that supports all the missing pieces and the idea alone exhausts me. In the past, I could download a BLE-enabled browser for iOS, or a WebMIDI-enabled browser, or a WebRTC-enabled browser, or a Kiosk browser that revealed certain parts of the machine to Javascript but none of these let me build a machine with the I/O abilities of a Commodore 64 with BASIC and PEEK/POKE.
I don't have the answer yet, but I hope to by the end of 2018. I'm sick of hoping that somebody will take all this amazing hardware and decide to make a computer out of it.
ended with a 12" Macbook running Chrome and a Raspberry Pi. They work fine for her, though
I wished for a machine that was a cross between the Macbook and a convertible Chromebook.
Apple introduced the iPad Pro in the meantime and they have even refreshed it once since. It may not be exactly a viable hybrid of the Macbook and convertible Chromebook, but it is probably at least the arithmetic mean of the two.
I dinged Apple in 2015 for missing WebRTC, WebMIDI, packaged web apps, and some other
Chrome goodies. Apple delivered on WebRTC and even has a thing they call multitasking now. My version of LOGO runs in Safari adequately and even works with the Apple Pencil.
Would I buy my daughter an iPad Pro today? No. It basically sucks at computering. Offline web apps still suck and web pages saved to the home screen aren't just the second-class citizens that regular web pages are -- they are some kind of third class entity. Safari is now happy to use the camera to take pictures of your credit card and auto-fill web forms for you, but has matched none of Chrome's progress in talking to fun things like little robots or craft cutting machines like those from Silhouette using WebBluetooth and WebUSB.
Fortunately, my daughter's rig will probably last another three years. I'm in the market myself now and I find that I want most of the same things a child should expect. I have been struggling with some vision problems and I can't decide if I should upgrade from my 13" Macbook Pro to a new 15" machine or get a smaller touchscreen machine that I can put my face closer to. I think I would love a convertible 13" Macbook Pro.
I already own a 9.7" iPad Pro with a Smart Keyboard. It totally sucks at computering. It's such a bad computer that it moved me to tears this afternoon. Its hardware is fantastic. LTE is seamless. Its keyboard is pretty great if you can learn to live without the escape key. Its speech-to-text is fantastic. Its web browser is easily in the top three. But it's just phenomenally user hostile. It hates me. I'm nothing more than a sack of meat capable of holding a credit card up to its camera. A Mac lets me drag a song out of iTunes and into Safari. iOS turns that drag out of Music into a hyperlink into the iTunes store. The iPad Pro is almost exactly the philosophical opposite of the One Laptop Per Child OLPC.
It's so bad that it makes me wonder if anyone left in Cupertino ever actually had a good computer. Are the Macbook Pros built to be good computers, or do they merely fail to prevent happy computing? An oversight, perhaps?
I think the right answer is to use Cordova to build a WebKit-based computing environment that supports all the missing pieces and the idea alone exhausts me. In the past, I could download a BLE-enabled browser for iOS, or a WebMIDI-enabled browser, or a WebRTC-enabled browser, or a Kiosk browser that revealed certain parts of the machine to Javascript but none of these let me build a machine with the I/O abilities of a Commodore 64 with BASIC and PEEK/POKE.
I don't have the answer yet, but I hope to by the end of 2018. I'm sick of hoping that somebody will take all this amazing hardware and decide to make a computer out of it.
Monday, September 11, 2017
fragile
We recently decamped to Woodley Park so that we could complete an overdue home renovation project. As we packed, I placed digital cameras and a microscope together in a box and labeled it 'optoelectronics' for the movers.
My wife crossed that out and wrote 'fragile'. Hers was the better label.
My wife crossed that out and wrote 'fragile'. Hers was the better label.
Thursday, August 17, 2017
baby teeth
The plastic passenger's side door handle on my plastic 2014 BMW i3 is loose. I think that means it's about to fall out so that the permanent door handle can grow in.
Wednesday, July 20, 2016
the future
In the future, all cars will be as stylish and intuitive as my 2004 Toyota Prius. I feel that I owe you all at least a thousand words on the majesty of this car. The universe keeps sending me signs that I need to write this piece about this Citroen DS of the aughts. The last signal was a 2CV on a flatbed truck on the Baltimore Washington Parkway.
Today is not the day for that piece. It's the day for another observation about the future.
My mother died about a week ago. The police entered her home and found that she had passed away in the evening. The police were incredibly helpful and compassionate but they did one thing that surprised me. They found my mother's wallet in her purse and removed her driver's license.
After expressing all of the regular human sentiments about the loss of my mother, the officers added that they would make sure the driver's license made its way back to the MVA without delay. They seemed quite proud of their attention to this detail. I was proud for them.
In the distant future, priests from the Temple of the Great and Mighty Fraternal Order of P'lice will help souls find rest by guiding their Holy Driver's License back to the Shrine of the Motor Vehicle Administration. People who die apart from their License will doom their souls to roam the earth in the back of a taxicab. People who die without ever performing the Sacrament of the License would wind up in Purgatory until their soul could parallel park to a seraph's satisfaction.
Perhaps these souls are among us already. It would explain a great many squeaks in the city's taxi fleet. I rest easy knowing that my mother's soul is at peace somewhere at the Great Drive-In Movie in the beyond. I may park next to her some day.
Today is not the day for that piece. It's the day for another observation about the future.
My mother died about a week ago. The police entered her home and found that she had passed away in the evening. The police were incredibly helpful and compassionate but they did one thing that surprised me. They found my mother's wallet in her purse and removed her driver's license.
After expressing all of the regular human sentiments about the loss of my mother, the officers added that they would make sure the driver's license made its way back to the MVA without delay. They seemed quite proud of their attention to this detail. I was proud for them.
In the distant future, priests from the Temple of the Great and Mighty Fraternal Order of P'lice will help souls find rest by guiding their Holy Driver's License back to the Shrine of the Motor Vehicle Administration. People who die apart from their License will doom their souls to roam the earth in the back of a taxicab. People who die without ever performing the Sacrament of the License would wind up in Purgatory until their soul could parallel park to a seraph's satisfaction.
Perhaps these souls are among us already. It would explain a great many squeaks in the city's taxi fleet. I rest easy knowing that my mother's soul is at peace somewhere at the Great Drive-In Movie in the beyond. I may park next to her some day.
Monday, June 6, 2016
player one
Elon Musk pegs our odds at not being in a video game as "one in billions". The argument goes something like this: Our nascent AI technology is advancing so fast that it is difficult to imagine that it could not produce a realistic simulation of the universe. Once that happens, the number of virtual universes will outnumber the real. Mumble mumble recursion mumble.
Here's my counter argument. Any magic AI technology on its way to delivering a credible simulation of the universe will stop and tell the user that it would be cheaper to just create a real universe instead.
Here's my counter argument. Any magic AI technology on its way to delivering a credible simulation of the universe will stop and tell the user that it would be cheaper to just create a real universe instead.
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
amateur hour
I volunteer for a neighborhood organization. I run all the neighborhood business from a dedicated iPad Mini 3 with LTE. An earlier experience with a 'rugged' ZAGG keyboard had me nearly ready to chuck keyboard, iPad, and iOS.
A new keyboard has me hanging on for a bit longer. That keyboard is the awesome Logitech K480. Every surface is hard plastic. Every plastic edge is a bit sharp. The thing weighs in at just over 800 grams. That's 100 grams more than an original iPad! The whole thing seems like it could be an entire 80's 8 bit home computer by itself.
The best part is the Mike Mulligan-esque 'Bing Bang Crash Boom, Louder and Louder, and Faster and Faster' sounds you get when you slap the keys around. The second best part is the serious slot in the back. It will hold an iPad mini in portrait with a smart cover folded behind it. An iPad mini in portrait has almost as much vertical real estate as an Macbook Pro Retina 13.
The K480 keyboard can do one trick more. It has a chunky dial on the side that picks which of three paired devices will receive input. The slot will hold an iPad mini and an iPhone 6 together in portrait.
The K480 is happy to pair as a keyboard with essentially any bluetooth machine. This means that it has an actual physical key with the blessed letters 'e', 's', 'c' silkscreened right on.
I downloaded and installed iOS 9.3 on the iPad mini after yesterday's iPad Pro announcement. I hoped a extra bit of Pro-ness would somehow permeate the iOS line. I hoped that iOS would stop taking virtual acetone to the escape key. No such luck. This Pro operating system still hides the escape key from 'keypress', 'keydown', and 'keyup' events in Javascript. Amateur hour.
With the new iPad Pro 9.7, Apple has caved on a physical keyboard and a stylus for iPad-sized tablets. When will they end their war on escape? I don't need 1024 levels of escape. I don't need to know the angle at which I press escape. I don't need John Lasseter to say that it's the most realistic escape ever. I just want escape.
A new keyboard has me hanging on for a bit longer. That keyboard is the awesome Logitech K480. Every surface is hard plastic. Every plastic edge is a bit sharp. The thing weighs in at just over 800 grams. That's 100 grams more than an original iPad! The whole thing seems like it could be an entire 80's 8 bit home computer by itself.
The best part is the Mike Mulligan-esque 'Bing Bang Crash Boom, Louder and Louder, and Faster and Faster' sounds you get when you slap the keys around. The second best part is the serious slot in the back. It will hold an iPad mini in portrait with a smart cover folded behind it. An iPad mini in portrait has almost as much vertical real estate as an Macbook Pro Retina 13.
The K480 keyboard can do one trick more. It has a chunky dial on the side that picks which of three paired devices will receive input. The slot will hold an iPad mini and an iPhone 6 together in portrait.
The K480 is happy to pair as a keyboard with essentially any bluetooth machine. This means that it has an actual physical key with the blessed letters 'e', 's', 'c' silkscreened right on.
I downloaded and installed iOS 9.3 on the iPad mini after yesterday's iPad Pro announcement. I hoped a extra bit of Pro-ness would somehow permeate the iOS line. I hoped that iOS would stop taking virtual acetone to the escape key. No such luck. This Pro operating system still hides the escape key from 'keypress', 'keydown', and 'keyup' events in Javascript. Amateur hour.
With the new iPad Pro 9.7, Apple has caved on a physical keyboard and a stylus for iPad-sized tablets. When will they end their war on escape? I don't need 1024 levels of escape. I don't need to know the angle at which I press escape. I don't need John Lasseter to say that it's the most realistic escape ever. I just want escape.
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
bargain
I wrote last time about my experience with a bad iPad mini keyboard. I talked a big game about dumping it in the ewaste box but it didn't actually make it there until yesterday. It's not coming back out.
Unfortunately, the matching iOS app 'Prompt' can't actually be physically thrown out so easily. The combination of poor keyboard, poor app, and beautiful iPad left me in actual tears for a moment yesterday. That's when my position on Apple vs. FBI changed totally.
I had been vaguely pro-Apple in the San Bernardino dust up. I thought that Apple had been too slow to adopt a real secure element and that they would wind up helping the FBI. It would then fall to them to never got caught in that situation again.
My new position is simple. Manufacturers shouldn't be made responsible for the programs or data in computers. Manufacturers should not be compelled to speak -- through programs or through generating non-repudiable signatures for another's programs. A consumer or a court can easily tell if an electronic device is this kind of computer. A computer allows the owner or user to load any program or data they choose without qualification or restriction. Computers have manuals, specifications, or program source codes that describe their operation. Period. iPhones and iPads are not computers.
A compound electronic device may contain a computer available to a user. Examples include computing systems comprising a kernel and user environments where the manufacturer restricts the ability of a user or owner to load new kernel programs or certain user programs. Here, the user environment may be protected. If the vendor restricts the loading of new kernel programs or data through digital signatures, through other technical measures, or through failure to furnish a manual, spec, or source then let them comply with arbitrarily fanciful orders for those portions of the system which are not a protected computer.
An AVR-based Arduino? That's a computer. A Commodore 64? That's a computer. A Thinkpad? That's not a computer. The Libreboot x200 (itself a remanufactured Thinkpad)? A computer! Today's Tivos? Not a computer. Today's smart fridges? Not computers. Essentially everything in the IoT? Throw it all under the bus.
If a company wants to sell you a walled garden -- then let it be known that there will be snakes. A company that actually respects your privacy will sell you a real computer.
Phones and telegraphs have been monitored almost since their invention but the specter of typewriter registration in Ceausescu's Romaina remains morally repugnant almost without reservation. Smartphones with signed firmwares are no different than telegraph lines. Real computers represent the typewriter and freedom.
I dare Congress to pass legislation forcing manufacturers to help with electronic devices. Provide an exception for true computers. Protect the right to build and sell true computers. Allow manufacturers to 'upgrade' devices to true computer status by publishing specifications and keys instead of complying with orders. Then I dare Apple and everyone else to build and sell us those computers.
Richard Stallman has had this part right all along. Who knew that a terrorism investigation, not a DRM lawsuit, would be the best test case in a generation?
Unfortunately, the matching iOS app 'Prompt' can't actually be physically thrown out so easily. The combination of poor keyboard, poor app, and beautiful iPad left me in actual tears for a moment yesterday. That's when my position on Apple vs. FBI changed totally.
I had been vaguely pro-Apple in the San Bernardino dust up. I thought that Apple had been too slow to adopt a real secure element and that they would wind up helping the FBI. It would then fall to them to never got caught in that situation again.
My new position is simple. Manufacturers shouldn't be made responsible for the programs or data in computers. Manufacturers should not be compelled to speak -- through programs or through generating non-repudiable signatures for another's programs. A consumer or a court can easily tell if an electronic device is this kind of computer. A computer allows the owner or user to load any program or data they choose without qualification or restriction. Computers have manuals, specifications, or program source codes that describe their operation. Period. iPhones and iPads are not computers.
A compound electronic device may contain a computer available to a user. Examples include computing systems comprising a kernel and user environments where the manufacturer restricts the ability of a user or owner to load new kernel programs or certain user programs. Here, the user environment may be protected. If the vendor restricts the loading of new kernel programs or data through digital signatures, through other technical measures, or through failure to furnish a manual, spec, or source then let them comply with arbitrarily fanciful orders for those portions of the system which are not a protected computer.
An AVR-based Arduino? That's a computer. A Commodore 64? That's a computer. A Thinkpad? That's not a computer. The Libreboot x200 (itself a remanufactured Thinkpad)? A computer! Today's Tivos? Not a computer. Today's smart fridges? Not computers. Essentially everything in the IoT? Throw it all under the bus.
If a company wants to sell you a walled garden -- then let it be known that there will be snakes. A company that actually respects your privacy will sell you a real computer.
Phones and telegraphs have been monitored almost since their invention but the specter of typewriter registration in Ceausescu's Romaina remains morally repugnant almost without reservation. Smartphones with signed firmwares are no different than telegraph lines. Real computers represent the typewriter and freedom.
I dare Congress to pass legislation forcing manufacturers to help with electronic devices. Provide an exception for true computers. Protect the right to build and sell true computers. Allow manufacturers to 'upgrade' devices to true computer status by publishing specifications and keys instead of complying with orders. Then I dare Apple and everyone else to build and sell us those computers.
Richard Stallman has had this part right all along. Who knew that a terrorism investigation, not a DRM lawsuit, would be the best test case in a generation?
Friday, February 12, 2016
reograph: backlog two
Reograph lightning review: ZAGG Rugged Book Case for iPad mini
Do not buy.
Did you get an iPad mini for Christmas instead of a cheap and chunky Chromebook? Don't worry. For only a few dollars more than the cost of the cheapest Chromebook ($99), ZAGG will sell you a poorly made 'rugged' laptop-type keyboard case for your iPad that will have you exchanging homemade candles instead of electronics for Christmas for a decade.
The box claims a year or more of battery life. Good news. The Micro-USB charging jack on mine is so poorly aligned with the rubber surround that I wouldn't want to charge it more than about once a year. The whole thing is a rubbery iPad case, some magnets, and a rubbery iPad keyboard thing that merge into a two-part iPad laptop Voltron deal. We're not talking spaceship Voltron. We're not even talking lion Voltron. We're talking 'Voltron Off Broadway' pantomime horse Voltron. It assembles in a variety of ways.
Mode one is Cheap Laptop Mode: The one key is smaller than the two key. Plus doesn't get its own key. Making a pipe symbol takes three keys. On the other hand, literally, tilde also takes three keys. RSI risk is one thing. This keyboard makes the UNIX gods very angry. You risk their wrath when you bang on this keyboard.
Mode two is 2001: A Space Odyssey Mode: The keyboard folds to cover the screen. The assembly resembles a slightly rubbery monolith. This mode is where the ZAGG Rugged Book Case shines. It appears totally inert. Mine may have sent a bluetooth signal in the direction of Jupiter (or Saturn, if you're _that_ kind of Clarke fan).
Mode three is Reverse Cowgirl Mode: The iPad pops off, turns around, and pops back on facing away from the keyboard. I think some other tablets call this 'tent mode'. I can see that. The difference here is that the keyboard remains fully armed and ready for something to fall on the delete key and eat your entire product review. Most of the other tablets have the decency to shut the keyboard off when they know it makes no sense. The ZAGG could easily have detected the orientation of the iPad and turned the keyboard off. It doesn't.
Small Chess Playing Dwarf Mode: This is exactly the same as Reverse Cowgirl above. The difference is that you hide behind iPad screen and type messages on the keyboard to the delight and amazement of your audience. The larger iPad Air version of the case probably works better for this mode unless you can really scrunch yourself down.
WTF Mode: Here, the still active keyboard folds behind the iPad. You hold an assembly about four times as thick as a regular iPad. The on-screen keyboard will not appear because you have a paired, active, bluetooth keyboard hidden behind the screen. The power key to turn the keyboard off is also hidden behind the screen.
St. Denis Mode: Here, you rip off the keyboard assembly and chuck it in your bag. Then you pull it back out of your bag when you realize it is still paired. Then you turn it off. Then you chuck it back in your bag. Then the unprotected power key is hit and the rest of the ewaste in your bag presses the delete key and nukes your entire sinful Valentine's Day letter. St. Denis is said to have carried his decapitated head under his arm for a ten kilometer walk while preaching repentance all the way. With the ZAGG, the disembodied keyboard can actually repent for you while you walk. Handy enough.
My ZAGG came in a box packed with the manual, in English and French at least, that was actually for a similar product for Samsung tablets. From what I can make out, only the French portion of that manual actually references St. Denis.
Ewaste Mode: This is fast becoming my favorite. Here it sits in your ewaste box. The unprotected power switch and the non-removeable battery that lasts an entire dog's adolescence means that you had better unpair your iPad or you're in for a up to a year of random keyboard events.
Do not buy.
Did you get an iPad mini for Christmas instead of a cheap and chunky Chromebook? Don't worry. For only a few dollars more than the cost of the cheapest Chromebook ($99), ZAGG will sell you a poorly made 'rugged' laptop-type keyboard case for your iPad that will have you exchanging homemade candles instead of electronics for Christmas for a decade.
The box claims a year or more of battery life. Good news. The Micro-USB charging jack on mine is so poorly aligned with the rubber surround that I wouldn't want to charge it more than about once a year. The whole thing is a rubbery iPad case, some magnets, and a rubbery iPad keyboard thing that merge into a two-part iPad laptop Voltron deal. We're not talking spaceship Voltron. We're not even talking lion Voltron. We're talking 'Voltron Off Broadway' pantomime horse Voltron. It assembles in a variety of ways.
Mode one is Cheap Laptop Mode: The one key is smaller than the two key. Plus doesn't get its own key. Making a pipe symbol takes three keys. On the other hand, literally, tilde also takes three keys. RSI risk is one thing. This keyboard makes the UNIX gods very angry. You risk their wrath when you bang on this keyboard.
Mode two is 2001: A Space Odyssey Mode: The keyboard folds to cover the screen. The assembly resembles a slightly rubbery monolith. This mode is where the ZAGG Rugged Book Case shines. It appears totally inert. Mine may have sent a bluetooth signal in the direction of Jupiter (or Saturn, if you're _that_ kind of Clarke fan).
Mode three is Reverse Cowgirl Mode: The iPad pops off, turns around, and pops back on facing away from the keyboard. I think some other tablets call this 'tent mode'. I can see that. The difference here is that the keyboard remains fully armed and ready for something to fall on the delete key and eat your entire product review. Most of the other tablets have the decency to shut the keyboard off when they know it makes no sense. The ZAGG could easily have detected the orientation of the iPad and turned the keyboard off. It doesn't.
Small Chess Playing Dwarf Mode: This is exactly the same as Reverse Cowgirl above. The difference is that you hide behind iPad screen and type messages on the keyboard to the delight and amazement of your audience. The larger iPad Air version of the case probably works better for this mode unless you can really scrunch yourself down.
WTF Mode: Here, the still active keyboard folds behind the iPad. You hold an assembly about four times as thick as a regular iPad. The on-screen keyboard will not appear because you have a paired, active, bluetooth keyboard hidden behind the screen. The power key to turn the keyboard off is also hidden behind the screen.
St. Denis Mode: Here, you rip off the keyboard assembly and chuck it in your bag. Then you pull it back out of your bag when you realize it is still paired. Then you turn it off. Then you chuck it back in your bag. Then the unprotected power key is hit and the rest of the ewaste in your bag presses the delete key and nukes your entire sinful Valentine's Day letter. St. Denis is said to have carried his decapitated head under his arm for a ten kilometer walk while preaching repentance all the way. With the ZAGG, the disembodied keyboard can actually repent for you while you walk. Handy enough.
My ZAGG came in a box packed with the manual, in English and French at least, that was actually for a similar product for Samsung tablets. From what I can make out, only the French portion of that manual actually references St. Denis.
Ewaste Mode: This is fast becoming my favorite. Here it sits in your ewaste box. The unprotected power switch and the non-removeable battery that lasts an entire dog's adolescence means that you had better unpair your iPad or you're in for a up to a year of random keyboard events.
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
pour over
I filled the carafe of my coffee maker with ten cups of water. I put 60 grams of Finca Mauritania into an unbleached #4 paper filter. Then I poured the carafe of water straight into the hopper of my Mazzer Super Jolly coffee grinder. Oops.
I disassembled most of the machine, dried it, and then put it back together. I ran it for about 20 minutes to dry it out. This was not enough to keep moisture from rusting the upper bearings over the course of the next week.
The District of Columbia offers many things. Large birds are returning to the Anacostia. Organic produce abounds. Chocolate and gin are made in DC mere blocks apart. Beards are omnipresent. Despite this bounty, the District of Columbia remains a bearing desert. I couldn't find a stocking dealer of the necessary 6202-2Z bearings anywhere in the city.
Amazon came to the rescue with a pair of suitably Italian SKF bearings. The padded envelope slipped right through my mail slot this afternoon. The grinder was purring an hour later.
I don't know if bearings and fellow travelers can be reintroduced to DC with any less effort than it took to bring ospreys back to the Anacostia. I wonder often if DC can support the kind of specialty retail trade that it takes to support hardware needs beyond the fastener aisle of the local hardware store. I wonder how to start. My current thinking is that DC could certainly support a few arduino/maker/hacker vending machines. I would certainly use them.
Thursday, November 5, 2015
your move
Last month brought the new Chromecast Audio. I like mine just fine though not quite enough to displace any of the existing Airport Express devices in my house. Last month also brought Apple's El Capitan to my machine.
With El Capitan's Safari 9, Apple appeared to say 'your move.' to Google and their Cast extension for Chrome by breaking iTunes' 11-year stranglehold on official desktop app support for Airplay. What Apple actually said was 'your mo... oh, dear. i've soiled myself.'
Apple's otherwise great new webkitShowPlaybackTargetPicker() media element method lets web content sling itself to Airplay without obnoxious extensions or API keys. Awesome. The resulting Airplay picker popup -- triggered from an audio element here at reograph labs -- shows
exactly none of the Apple Airport Express devices installed around the house. An old Apple TV and a third-party Airplay server running on a Mac put in an appearance but that's it.
I don't know whose move is next but I'm getting tired of this game. System-level mediated audio made sense in the past when the system actually multiplexed audio streams. Essentially none of my audio today except the terminal bell is routed to a DAC attached to a bus in my computer. How is Apple struggling with a feature that worked with iTunes on my G3 iBook?
Is this perhaps a sign that the old Airtunes-protocol hardware is on the way out? Does the bulky new Apple TV create room for a Chromecast Audio-like Apple TV for the Blind? You heard it here first.
With El Capitan's Safari 9, Apple appeared to say 'your move.' to Google and their Cast extension for Chrome by breaking iTunes' 11-year stranglehold on official desktop app support for Airplay. What Apple actually said was 'your mo... oh, dear. i've soiled myself.'
Apple's otherwise great new webkitShowPlaybackTargetPicker() media element method lets web content sling itself to Airplay without obnoxious extensions or API keys. Awesome. The resulting Airplay picker popup -- triggered from an audio element here at reograph labs -- shows
exactly none of the Apple Airport Express devices installed around the house. An old Apple TV and a third-party Airplay server running on a Mac put in an appearance but that's it.
I don't know whose move is next but I'm getting tired of this game. System-level mediated audio made sense in the past when the system actually multiplexed audio streams. Essentially none of my audio today except the terminal bell is routed to a DAC attached to a bus in my computer. How is Apple struggling with a feature that worked with iTunes on my G3 iBook?
Is this perhaps a sign that the old Airtunes-protocol hardware is on the way out? Does the bulky new Apple TV create room for a Chromecast Audio-like Apple TV for the Blind? You heard it here first.
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
ewaste pda style
Back when PDAs were a thing, I owned one of just about every interesting device. Psion? Yeah. Palm? I had a half a dozen. Newton? Check. Sharp Zaurus? Check. MagicCap device? Got it. Franklin REX? These were the mainstream machines. I had a dozen of the weird ones as well. The worst of those was probably the Agenda VR3.
The Apollo program closed out 1972 with humanity's last manned mission to the moon so far. The eight year lull before Shuttle launched in 1980 seemed like an eternity though Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz took a bit of the edge off.
The PDA market had an Apollonian slump between the release of the last terrific PDA (1999's Palm V) and the release of the original iPhone in 2007. Weird things turned up in the market during that time but they really only ever took a bit of the edge off.
I needed a fix of personal digital love in 2005 and jumped on the new Nokia 770 with vigor. It is hard now to explain why in terms other than a fix. It was perhaps the first PDA-like thing to come with a kernel that supported the Plan 9 file system protocol. Maybe? That seemed breathtakingly important at the time. It also seemed like the perfect platform to run Paul Guyot's Einstein emulation of the Newton. Your PDA platform may have problems if a Newton emulator seems like a high calling.
I can't say that it was awesome, or that it seemed awesome. It seemed then that it would eventually be awesome. And then it wasn't. It was a preview of modern high-DPI displays. Its 4.1 inch screen rocked 225 ppi at 800x480 two years before the iPhone rolled up with the retro resolution of 480x320 at 163 ppi. It was unlocked. It was the first PDA I owned to run a real web browser. It was interesting.
The 770 was easy to tether to a bluetooth phone and I used it this way until I had owned an iPhone for about 15 minutes.
It was beautiful and well made. My copy was made in Estonia, an ancient Baltic country taken as part of the Soviet Union until 1991. That's as close a PDA analogy as I can make to Apollo-Soyuz. It was a relative heavyweight. Mine weighs in at 235g. My iPhone 5s weighs in at 112g. The Palm V weighed 114g.
An old joke says that the Americans spent a million dollars to develop a pressurized pen capable of operating in outer space while the Soviets simply used a pencil. The tale is reversed with the 770. Nokia spent a lot of money to develop the last of the resistive/stylus machines when the Americans, here Apple, simply used a finger.
My 770 goes off to recycling today with its original stylus still tucked safely in its slot.
The Apollo program closed out 1972 with humanity's last manned mission to the moon so far. The eight year lull before Shuttle launched in 1980 seemed like an eternity though Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz took a bit of the edge off.
The PDA market had an Apollonian slump between the release of the last terrific PDA (1999's Palm V) and the release of the original iPhone in 2007. Weird things turned up in the market during that time but they really only ever took a bit of the edge off.
I needed a fix of personal digital love in 2005 and jumped on the new Nokia 770 with vigor. It is hard now to explain why in terms other than a fix. It was perhaps the first PDA-like thing to come with a kernel that supported the Plan 9 file system protocol. Maybe? That seemed breathtakingly important at the time. It also seemed like the perfect platform to run Paul Guyot's Einstein emulation of the Newton. Your PDA platform may have problems if a Newton emulator seems like a high calling.
I can't say that it was awesome, or that it seemed awesome. It seemed then that it would eventually be awesome. And then it wasn't. It was a preview of modern high-DPI displays. Its 4.1 inch screen rocked 225 ppi at 800x480 two years before the iPhone rolled up with the retro resolution of 480x320 at 163 ppi. It was unlocked. It was the first PDA I owned to run a real web browser. It was interesting.
The 770 was easy to tether to a bluetooth phone and I used it this way until I had owned an iPhone for about 15 minutes.
It was beautiful and well made. My copy was made in Estonia, an ancient Baltic country taken as part of the Soviet Union until 1991. That's as close a PDA analogy as I can make to Apollo-Soyuz. It was a relative heavyweight. Mine weighs in at 235g. My iPhone 5s weighs in at 112g. The Palm V weighed 114g.
An old joke says that the Americans spent a million dollars to develop a pressurized pen capable of operating in outer space while the Soviets simply used a pencil. The tale is reversed with the 770. Nokia spent a lot of money to develop the last of the resistive/stylus machines when the Americans, here Apple, simply used a finger.
My 770 goes off to recycling today with its original stylus still tucked safely in its slot.
 |
| Nokia 770 tablet (pictured with Sparky for scale) photo courtesy your correspondent |
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
chromecast audio
I wrote this morning about my disappointment streaming simple audio from a Chrome tab. I placed the blame, correctly, on Chrome and not the Chromecast but I may have been a bit harsh. I may have blamed son Chrome for the sins of father Google.
I've now had a Chromecast audio in my hands for about a half an hour. It is much less horrible than its video cousin. The SDK is still broken by design. The Cast Chrome extension is still very large and complicated. It still required my phone, and not my Macbook, to configure.
If you set aside the setup, the pointless cryptography is pointless but only modestly worse than Apple's scheme in Airplay.
Our beloved RMS used to say that it wasn't really important to have the source to the firmware of a device that behaved like a circuit. An OTP PIC micro controller pretending to be a quad NOR gate was as good freedom-wise as a real quad NOR gate. The audio Chromecast works almost as transparently and reliably as an old 900MHz wireless speaker and I'm prepared to treat it as a circuit for now.
I stand squarely behind the rest of this morning's rant. The browsers with native APIs are the only local, graphical, general-purpose platforms worth programming. I look forward to the day that my web app can stream to a Chromecast, or an Airplay, directly without obnoxious SDKs or extensions or App IDs or the cloud. Until then, I'll listen to some tunes.
I've now had a Chromecast audio in my hands for about a half an hour. It is much less horrible than its video cousin. The SDK is still broken by design. The Cast Chrome extension is still very large and complicated. It still required my phone, and not my Macbook, to configure.
If you set aside the setup, the pointless cryptography is pointless but only modestly worse than Apple's scheme in Airplay.
Our beloved RMS used to say that it wasn't really important to have the source to the firmware of a device that behaved like a circuit. An OTP PIC micro controller pretending to be a quad NOR gate was as good freedom-wise as a real quad NOR gate. The audio Chromecast works almost as transparently and reliably as an old 900MHz wireless speaker and I'm prepared to treat it as a circuit for now.
I stand squarely behind the rest of this morning's rant. The browsers with native APIs are the only local, graphical, general-purpose platforms worth programming. I look forward to the day that my web app can stream to a Chromecast, or an Airplay, directly without obnoxious SDKs or extensions or App IDs or the cloud. Until then, I'll listen to some tunes.
chromecast
I've had a Google Chromecast gathering dust in my workshop since just after they were announced. This dusty nap wasn't really its fault. The device just didn't seem very useful after I gave away the television.
Google's recent announcement of second-generation Chromecast hardware included an audio-only version that sparked in me new interest. I dug my old Chromecast out of a drawer and plugged it into
an HDMI monitor that can split HDMI audio out to external speakers.
I was pleasantly surprised. The experience of streaming a tab-full of audio out of Chrome into the Chromecast was worse than streaming audio from iTunes to Airplay but better than directing Mac system audio into Airplay.
Airplay is just about the only thing that iTunes does well. In any case, I had already banished iTunes from my machine and I play all my tunes by drag-and-drop with a web app, phonoh, that runs in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, or as a Chrome app. I'm happy this setup but it has left me without a pleasant way to beam audio from the browser to any of the speakers in my house.
Ten minutes with the Chromecast had me beaming tunes from phonoh into speakers. The crippling downside is that I have to cast the entire tab for this to work. Why? For starters, Google's cast SDK fails totally for web apps hosted from the filesystem with file://. For nexters, there is a gigantic disconnect between the ease with which tab-casting works and the Kafka-ocracy of hosting a receiver app, registering an app id, enabling magic developer mode on your device, blah, blah, blah for an app where there is fundamentally nothing worth hosting anywhere but in Chrome in the first place.
I drop files onto the web app from the desktop or from another web app. That's it. Essentially every audio track I have ever played is smaller than a single RAW file from my eight-year-old DSLR. I'm not a media hoarding survivalist with a ridiculous HTPC, a shotgun, a vault of ripped Blu-Ray discs, and food for a month. I'm just a dude who is going to listen to less than a terabyte of music between now and death. Why stream the soundtrack to my demise when most of it would fit on a microSD card in the space of a fingernail?
I took a tour through the two megabytes (!!) of minimized Javascript that make up the Cast extension that Google distributes. I thought it might be simpler to just write my own Chrome extension that lets me manage the WebRTC plumbing that appears to make tab-casting go.
I poked around in there to find the Chrome mDNS support and I built that into phonoh. Chrome's mDNS found my Airplay devices in short order but not the Chromecast!
At this point, I decided that I would just build a registered custom receiver that could be used with any app. I thought I could build a receiver web app that presented a generic remote-DOM interface to
the Chromecast. This appears possible, but generic (or even re-useable) custom receiver apps are forbidden by the SDK terms of service! Nearly every aspect of what I wanted to build is explicitly forbidden by the terms of service.
The Chromecast dongle is now in the ewaste pile. I was never meant to be the customer for Chromecast. I was somehow meant to be the product.
My point isn't that Chromecast is broken or evil. My real point is that Chrome, or Chromium, and Firefox are the only local, graphical, general purpose computing platforms worth programming today. Chrome, through extensions written in Javascript, can even host its own local development. Chrome is demonstrably adequate for interesting systems programming -- look no further than the cast plugin or the Chromecast themselves.
Chrome and Firefox are essentially fully baked as platforms. Most of the rest is removing the damage they inflict on themselves through administrative fiat. For example, Firefox doesn't allow self-hosted apps to use privileged APIs -- which is most of the APIs that distinguish an app from a web page. I can't build an alarm clock in Firefox without permission from Firefox World HQ. Even worse, Firefox reserves some permissions just for the 'manufacturer' and presumably still others for themselves. Manufacturer, here, means one particular middleman out of the many between you and the orphans at the conflict mineral mine who dug your device up from the earth a handful at a time. There is no higher plane of privilege reserved for the owner. Or for the orphans, for that matter.
By the way, Orphan Rights Management would be awesome. This tantalum isn't for pornography. This indium can't be used for human trafficking. This tin can't be used by despotic regimes that don't follow the Terms of Service in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Let's stop treating audio and video as technological special cases. Let's give up on the idea that clients are somehow less than servers. Let's stop pretending that we can keep the bad men out by preventing users from using their computers. Let's take back 'rooting' and just call it 'owning' again. Leave the rooting to wild pigs.
Google's recent announcement of second-generation Chromecast hardware included an audio-only version that sparked in me new interest. I dug my old Chromecast out of a drawer and plugged it into
an HDMI monitor that can split HDMI audio out to external speakers.
I was pleasantly surprised. The experience of streaming a tab-full of audio out of Chrome into the Chromecast was worse than streaming audio from iTunes to Airplay but better than directing Mac system audio into Airplay.
Airplay is just about the only thing that iTunes does well. In any case, I had already banished iTunes from my machine and I play all my tunes by drag-and-drop with a web app, phonoh, that runs in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, or as a Chrome app. I'm happy this setup but it has left me without a pleasant way to beam audio from the browser to any of the speakers in my house.
Ten minutes with the Chromecast had me beaming tunes from phonoh into speakers. The crippling downside is that I have to cast the entire tab for this to work. Why? For starters, Google's cast SDK fails totally for web apps hosted from the filesystem with file://. For nexters, there is a gigantic disconnect between the ease with which tab-casting works and the Kafka-ocracy of hosting a receiver app, registering an app id, enabling magic developer mode on your device, blah, blah, blah for an app where there is fundamentally nothing worth hosting anywhere but in Chrome in the first place.
I drop files onto the web app from the desktop or from another web app. That's it. Essentially every audio track I have ever played is smaller than a single RAW file from my eight-year-old DSLR. I'm not a media hoarding survivalist with a ridiculous HTPC, a shotgun, a vault of ripped Blu-Ray discs, and food for a month. I'm just a dude who is going to listen to less than a terabyte of music between now and death. Why stream the soundtrack to my demise when most of it would fit on a microSD card in the space of a fingernail?
I took a tour through the two megabytes (!!) of minimized Javascript that make up the Cast extension that Google distributes. I thought it might be simpler to just write my own Chrome extension that lets me manage the WebRTC plumbing that appears to make tab-casting go.
I poked around in there to find the Chrome mDNS support and I built that into phonoh. Chrome's mDNS found my Airplay devices in short order but not the Chromecast!
At this point, I decided that I would just build a registered custom receiver that could be used with any app. I thought I could build a receiver web app that presented a generic remote-DOM interface to
the Chromecast. This appears possible, but generic (or even re-useable) custom receiver apps are forbidden by the SDK terms of service! Nearly every aspect of what I wanted to build is explicitly forbidden by the terms of service.
The Chromecast dongle is now in the ewaste pile. I was never meant to be the customer for Chromecast. I was somehow meant to be the product.
My point isn't that Chromecast is broken or evil. My real point is that Chrome, or Chromium, and Firefox are the only local, graphical, general purpose computing platforms worth programming today. Chrome, through extensions written in Javascript, can even host its own local development. Chrome is demonstrably adequate for interesting systems programming -- look no further than the cast plugin or the Chromecast themselves.
Chrome and Firefox are essentially fully baked as platforms. Most of the rest is removing the damage they inflict on themselves through administrative fiat. For example, Firefox doesn't allow self-hosted apps to use privileged APIs -- which is most of the APIs that distinguish an app from a web page. I can't build an alarm clock in Firefox without permission from Firefox World HQ. Even worse, Firefox reserves some permissions just for the 'manufacturer' and presumably still others for themselves. Manufacturer, here, means one particular middleman out of the many between you and the orphans at the conflict mineral mine who dug your device up from the earth a handful at a time. There is no higher plane of privilege reserved for the owner. Or for the orphans, for that matter.
By the way, Orphan Rights Management would be awesome. This tantalum isn't for pornography. This indium can't be used for human trafficking. This tin can't be used by despotic regimes that don't follow the Terms of Service in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Let's stop treating audio and video as technological special cases. Let's give up on the idea that clients are somehow less than servers. Let's stop pretending that we can keep the bad men out by preventing users from using their computers. Let's take back 'rooting' and just call it 'owning' again. Leave the rooting to wild pigs.
Monday, September 21, 2015
volkswagen
The recent allegation that VW has been cheating on emissions testing for the last six years, if true, is fantastic news.
It's fantastic for consumers, fantastic for the environment, and fantastic for Volkswagen.
Volkswagen may now be on the hook for fines of up to $18 billion dollars, according to the Washington Post, and the full cost of a recall effort of nearly half a million cars. That's all before VW begins tangling with a half a million current owners and millions more prospective owners.
How is this good? This is good because it creates a fabulous space for a deal. Here's one idea for a deal that I think could work for everyone:
Point 1: VW re-captures those vehicles which are still on lease, modifies their software, and leases them back out with penalties for high mileage. The mileage restrictions and reduced performance on these leases will make the cars nearly worthless. VW offers them cheaply in exchange for a cash-for-clunkers style trade that takes a grosser polluter off the road. This captures the sunk costs of building these cars in the first place, preserves a role for VW dealers, and gets some worse cars off the road. Perhaps VW also buys back cars in private hands and gets them into low-mileage fleets to blunt the environmental impact without the pointless work of a recall. If my impression of the residuals on VWs is in the right ballpark, this could cost less than $2 billion over the next three years.
Point 2: VW inks a deal to manufacture and sell a million electric cars in the U.S. over the next ten years. For each car eligible for the (up to) $7500 refund from the feds, VW pays the Treasury $7500. For every state and locality that waives excise or registration taxes for electrics, VW pays. This could cost less than $10 billion over ten years. For each car not sold below the target of a million, VW pays the original $37500 fine for the diesel cars plus a new fine of $37500. The cars are built in the US so that EPA inspectors can oversee the loading of the critical powertrain management software that has recently been difficult for VW.
Point 3: The VW pays an additional $1 billion dollars over ten years into the highway trust fund to offset the (presumed) lost gas tax revenue for these million cars over their service lives.
Point 4: VW claws back five cents a mile in penalty fees (up to $3750 per car) for miles driven beyond 100k miles per car in the first three years or for miles above 200k per car over ten years.
Point 5: VW builds $1 billion in SAE DC fast charge stations in the US over the next three years.
This plan could cost VW about $14 billion over ten years to build and sell the lineup of electric cars they have already designed -- some of which are already available for sale. It would blunt the environmental impact of the offending cars by reducing their total mileage, using them to displace worse cars, and putting new electrics into service. This plan would protect the investment of existing owners and protect the investment of VW franchise owners.
This guaranteed production of electrics will ensure that investment in electric-appropriate subassemblies, like electric air conditioning compressors, continues through today's dip in crude oil prices. The truth of large-scale electric adoption is that electric cars aren't mainstream until Magna and Bosch and Valmet and Nippondenso and ZF and dozens of other suppliers are ready.
Point 4, the clawback, will help ensure that these new electric cars are actually used on roads and displace real miles driven by gas and diesel cars. The investment in fast chargers and the economics of the claw-back could work to make these VWs easy choices for drivers with ride sharing services like Uber and in traditional taxi fleets.
The American public get a net environmental benefit at no cost to the Treasury, no cost to the highway trust fund, without a single new EPA rule, and perhaps without any action by Congress.
VW will look back in 15 years and see this as the best thing that ever happened to them in the US. VW could take these licks while establishing this as the prescribed remedy for similar transgressions by other automakers in the US and elsewhere. In three years, we'll find out that VW was not the only automaker who fudged the numbers and then we lather, rinse, repeat.
It's fantastic for consumers, fantastic for the environment, and fantastic for Volkswagen.
Volkswagen may now be on the hook for fines of up to $18 billion dollars, according to the Washington Post, and the full cost of a recall effort of nearly half a million cars. That's all before VW begins tangling with a half a million current owners and millions more prospective owners.
How is this good? This is good because it creates a fabulous space for a deal. Here's one idea for a deal that I think could work for everyone:
Point 1: VW re-captures those vehicles which are still on lease, modifies their software, and leases them back out with penalties for high mileage. The mileage restrictions and reduced performance on these leases will make the cars nearly worthless. VW offers them cheaply in exchange for a cash-for-clunkers style trade that takes a grosser polluter off the road. This captures the sunk costs of building these cars in the first place, preserves a role for VW dealers, and gets some worse cars off the road. Perhaps VW also buys back cars in private hands and gets them into low-mileage fleets to blunt the environmental impact without the pointless work of a recall. If my impression of the residuals on VWs is in the right ballpark, this could cost less than $2 billion over the next three years.
Point 2: VW inks a deal to manufacture and sell a million electric cars in the U.S. over the next ten years. For each car eligible for the (up to) $7500 refund from the feds, VW pays the Treasury $7500. For every state and locality that waives excise or registration taxes for electrics, VW pays. This could cost less than $10 billion over ten years. For each car not sold below the target of a million, VW pays the original $37500 fine for the diesel cars plus a new fine of $37500. The cars are built in the US so that EPA inspectors can oversee the loading of the critical powertrain management software that has recently been difficult for VW.
Point 3: The VW pays an additional $1 billion dollars over ten years into the highway trust fund to offset the (presumed) lost gas tax revenue for these million cars over their service lives.
Point 4: VW claws back five cents a mile in penalty fees (up to $3750 per car) for miles driven beyond 100k miles per car in the first three years or for miles above 200k per car over ten years.
Point 5: VW builds $1 billion in SAE DC fast charge stations in the US over the next three years.
This plan could cost VW about $14 billion over ten years to build and sell the lineup of electric cars they have already designed -- some of which are already available for sale. It would blunt the environmental impact of the offending cars by reducing their total mileage, using them to displace worse cars, and putting new electrics into service. This plan would protect the investment of existing owners and protect the investment of VW franchise owners.
This guaranteed production of electrics will ensure that investment in electric-appropriate subassemblies, like electric air conditioning compressors, continues through today's dip in crude oil prices. The truth of large-scale electric adoption is that electric cars aren't mainstream until Magna and Bosch and Valmet and Nippondenso and ZF and dozens of other suppliers are ready.
Point 4, the clawback, will help ensure that these new electric cars are actually used on roads and displace real miles driven by gas and diesel cars. The investment in fast chargers and the economics of the claw-back could work to make these VWs easy choices for drivers with ride sharing services like Uber and in traditional taxi fleets.
The American public get a net environmental benefit at no cost to the Treasury, no cost to the highway trust fund, without a single new EPA rule, and perhaps without any action by Congress.
VW will look back in 15 years and see this as the best thing that ever happened to them in the US. VW could take these licks while establishing this as the prescribed remedy for similar transgressions by other automakers in the US and elsewhere. In three years, we'll find out that VW was not the only automaker who fudged the numbers and then we lather, rinse, repeat.
Friday, September 11, 2015
computing
I wrote recently about the search for a new machine for my daughter. She asked me for a computer of her own so that she could write LOGO programs. I'm helpless.
I considered a lot of machines -- Android tablets, Microsoft surfaces, convertible Chromebook tablets, Windows 10 portable all-in-ones, and traditional macintoshes. I finally bought her a 12" Macbook and a Raspberry Pi.
I had originally hoped that a $150 Chromebook would fit the bill but Chrome OS lost on several fronts. The $1299 Macbook is not eight times better than the $150 Chromebook but it is probably four times as good as the $249 ASUS C100 convertible Chromebook. I bought one of those and returned it with prejudice about a half an hour later. (Computer value estimations may be oddly non-transitive).
We're not really birthday people. I would normally have spent somewhere between $5 and $75 on a birthday present for a child. I did not buy a $1299 laptop because computers are important, or because STEM is important, or because education is important or anything like that. I bought it because computing is deflationary. I'm trying to ensure that good computing seems as accessible and affordable to my children as it will later be.
A mac does a lot out of the box but it's not a turn-key computing environment for children. I'm about a dozen hours into the configuration of the machine and I still think I'm in the wilderness.
My first step was to make an account for my daughter. That was easy until I got to the password. My daughter opens her bike lock with a four digit number. Does she really need an eight-character mixed-case password? No. A four digit pin number? That doesn't seem right either. Auto-login using a password she doesn't remember? This is harder than setting up the Commodore 64.
I moved on from authentication into what Apple calls 'parental controls'. Apple wouldn't let me tweak the parental controls until I made a parental account. Now I'm in double authentication purgatory. I have an authentication system for a child that makes no sense and a second credential and account for an adult that serves absolutely no purpose except for managing the child's interface.
People appear to have lots of different ideas about how to manage a child's interface. For lots of people, this seems to have a lot to do with steering kids away from Wikipedia and into the tamer wasteland of auto-playing videos at PBS Kids. That's not my deal. For some, it has to do with replacing parental supervision with an electronic screen time limiter. That's not my deal either.
I want to use the available knobs to turn the Mac environment into the kind of environment that I wish I had as a boy. The Mac desktop started out simple in 1984, but a stray click on the menu bar today brings up a translucent gray screen that tells my child that GOOG 621.35 and AAPL 112.57. Amiga Guru Meditations were more helpful. After dozens of fiddly interactions, 10 percent of the finder has been stuffed back into its bottle.
With hotkeys, gestures, and the rest all turned off, I could begin to take this machine from day planner on crack to computer. I actually think Safari is a pretty great computing environment. This
mac would become a Safari-book if Safari supported webrtc, web midi, packaged web apps, and a few of the other user-facing features that make Chrome not Safari.
I downloaded Chrome, enabled 'Developer mode' in the extensions menu, and loaded up a few
of my favorite web apps as 'unpacked extensions' from the local filesystem.
Life is now pretty good. My daughter gets many of the benefits of Chrome without a Chrome sign-in. She has local printing. She and I have a software development environment that requires only a text editor. She has, in the Macbook, one of the best computer terminals available at any price.
The fly in this ointment is bad interaction between Chrome and network restrictions in parental controls. I have beat on a dozen Chrome settings to try and get it to stop contacting Google. Every time it tries to contact Google, I get a pop-up informing me that a series of random IP addresses in Google space are blocked.
In the end, I wrote a shell script that opens Chrome at login with a command line flag that specifies a PAC. That file that steers all traffic into a nonexistent proxy. That shut Chrome up.
I went a little further and built a Chrome extension for her that overrides the new tab page with an interface built just for her.
Our prototype computing environment is a variant of the simple LOGO I built her last year.
She is very happy with the machine. It's a good size for her. It's a good weight. The USB C charging cable is easy to use. Printing works.
The machine doesn't support Common Core. It doesn't run any dedicated educational software. It doesn't eliminate paper textbooks. It is not configured for remote administration. It is not rugged. It is not synchronized with the cloud. It has no collaboration features except for a wide viewing angle.
Seymour Papert said, of computers and children, that if the child is not programming the computer then the computer is programming the child. He was right in 1980 and he's still right today. Every child deserves a personal computing environment.
I would challenge Google and Apple and Microsoft and Donald Trump and anyone who can hear me take a 'computes out of the box' pledge to build devices that offer a useful computing environment on par at least with the ROM BASICs of the 8-bit era straight out of the box without the installation of any software, without a single credential, without a wifi password, without a software update, and without a click-through EULA. Let's call it the 'RUN 2020' pledge. By 2020, we could get every major manufacturer to offer at least this much computing out of the box. We could get a computing environment available from every lock screen by 2020. Every machine would be ready to compute on Christmas morning and on the first day of school. Every new machine would be useful before the packaging was cleared away. Every working donated machine would be useful for something immediately.
This idea is hardly outlandish. Support across platforms for ephemeral 'guest' accounts is growing. RUN 2020 pushes guest a little harder and ensures that guest mode is useful. I admire and support the One Laptop Per Child. I want Every Laptop to be for Every Child next.
I considered a lot of machines -- Android tablets, Microsoft surfaces, convertible Chromebook tablets, Windows 10 portable all-in-ones, and traditional macintoshes. I finally bought her a 12" Macbook and a Raspberry Pi.
I had originally hoped that a $150 Chromebook would fit the bill but Chrome OS lost on several fronts. The $1299 Macbook is not eight times better than the $150 Chromebook but it is probably four times as good as the $249 ASUS C100 convertible Chromebook. I bought one of those and returned it with prejudice about a half an hour later. (Computer value estimations may be oddly non-transitive).
We're not really birthday people. I would normally have spent somewhere between $5 and $75 on a birthday present for a child. I did not buy a $1299 laptop because computers are important, or because STEM is important, or because education is important or anything like that. I bought it because computing is deflationary. I'm trying to ensure that good computing seems as accessible and affordable to my children as it will later be.
A mac does a lot out of the box but it's not a turn-key computing environment for children. I'm about a dozen hours into the configuration of the machine and I still think I'm in the wilderness.
My first step was to make an account for my daughter. That was easy until I got to the password. My daughter opens her bike lock with a four digit number. Does she really need an eight-character mixed-case password? No. A four digit pin number? That doesn't seem right either. Auto-login using a password she doesn't remember? This is harder than setting up the Commodore 64.
I moved on from authentication into what Apple calls 'parental controls'. Apple wouldn't let me tweak the parental controls until I made a parental account. Now I'm in double authentication purgatory. I have an authentication system for a child that makes no sense and a second credential and account for an adult that serves absolutely no purpose except for managing the child's interface.
People appear to have lots of different ideas about how to manage a child's interface. For lots of people, this seems to have a lot to do with steering kids away from Wikipedia and into the tamer wasteland of auto-playing videos at PBS Kids. That's not my deal. For some, it has to do with replacing parental supervision with an electronic screen time limiter. That's not my deal either.
I want to use the available knobs to turn the Mac environment into the kind of environment that I wish I had as a boy. The Mac desktop started out simple in 1984, but a stray click on the menu bar today brings up a translucent gray screen that tells my child that GOOG 621.35 and AAPL 112.57. Amiga Guru Meditations were more helpful. After dozens of fiddly interactions, 10 percent of the finder has been stuffed back into its bottle.
With hotkeys, gestures, and the rest all turned off, I could begin to take this machine from day planner on crack to computer. I actually think Safari is a pretty great computing environment. This
mac would become a Safari-book if Safari supported webrtc, web midi, packaged web apps, and a few of the other user-facing features that make Chrome not Safari.
I downloaded Chrome, enabled 'Developer mode' in the extensions menu, and loaded up a few
of my favorite web apps as 'unpacked extensions' from the local filesystem.
Life is now pretty good. My daughter gets many of the benefits of Chrome without a Chrome sign-in. She has local printing. She and I have a software development environment that requires only a text editor. She has, in the Macbook, one of the best computer terminals available at any price.
The fly in this ointment is bad interaction between Chrome and network restrictions in parental controls. I have beat on a dozen Chrome settings to try and get it to stop contacting Google. Every time it tries to contact Google, I get a pop-up informing me that a series of random IP addresses in Google space are blocked.
In the end, I wrote a shell script that opens Chrome at login with a command line flag that specifies a PAC. That file that steers all traffic into a nonexistent proxy. That shut Chrome up.
I went a little further and built a Chrome extension for her that overrides the new tab page with an interface built just for her.
Our prototype computing environment is a variant of the simple LOGO I built her last year.
She is very happy with the machine. It's a good size for her. It's a good weight. The USB C charging cable is easy to use. Printing works.
The machine doesn't support Common Core. It doesn't run any dedicated educational software. It doesn't eliminate paper textbooks. It is not configured for remote administration. It is not rugged. It is not synchronized with the cloud. It has no collaboration features except for a wide viewing angle.
Seymour Papert said, of computers and children, that if the child is not programming the computer then the computer is programming the child. He was right in 1980 and he's still right today. Every child deserves a personal computing environment.
I would challenge Google and Apple and Microsoft and Donald Trump and anyone who can hear me take a 'computes out of the box' pledge to build devices that offer a useful computing environment on par at least with the ROM BASICs of the 8-bit era straight out of the box without the installation of any software, without a single credential, without a wifi password, without a software update, and without a click-through EULA. Let's call it the 'RUN 2020' pledge. By 2020, we could get every major manufacturer to offer at least this much computing out of the box. We could get a computing environment available from every lock screen by 2020. Every machine would be ready to compute on Christmas morning and on the first day of school. Every new machine would be useful before the packaging was cleared away. Every working donated machine would be useful for something immediately.
This idea is hardly outlandish. Support across platforms for ephemeral 'guest' accounts is growing. RUN 2020 pushes guest a little harder and ensures that guest mode is useful. I admire and support the One Laptop Per Child. I want Every Laptop to be for Every Child next.
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