I wrote about cord cutting two months ago. I ditched my DSL in favor of a tethered LTE iPad for my entire domestic connectivity. I got 30 GB of data from Verizon for $225 -- a marginal increase of $155 over my previous cell phone bill.
I found soon after that 30GB wasn't quite enough. I went to 40 GB for $300, and even then a bit past. This was starting to look like real money. My gamble was that data prices would tumble in just the way that my DSL price never did. The gamble paid off yesterday when I took advantage of a data sale at Verizon. My plan is now for 60 GB for $225. I could have kept 40 GB for $150.
At that price, LTE would have matched my previous DSL price point with better speed and a modest constraint on my usage. At 60 GB, I live unconstrained. Dropping data prices are a reality. The new question is whether they will fall faster than my usage grows. I wager they will.
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
charged
I'm on a train in England. My bags are packed for home. My gadgets are charged. I have been fed. Reograph time.
It is always difficult for me to do any computing in England without thinking of the hardware of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That machine functioned not only as imagined Wikipedia but also as Ford Prefect's reporter's notebook for 15 disconnected years on Earth. Even today, the model 100 might be more fit for that purpose than a stock tablet.
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
neue neue klasse
I recently bought a new BMW i3. Some thoughts:
BMW introduced the 1500 sedan in the fall of 1962. This was the first of the 'Neue Klasse' cars, and the first of a line from which most modern BMW cars can trace their lineage. 1500 begat 1600, 1800, and 2000 cars. These sedans, in turn, begat the BMW 5 series cars. The 1600 also begat the 1602 and 2002 cars that became the BMW 3 series.
Of all the Neue Klasse cars, none stand out more in popular automotive mythology than the 2002. That car may be the one that established BMW as a sporting line in the mind of the American driver. It spawned performance versions, the 2002tii and 2002 Turbo, that are the grandparents of BMW's storied M3.
I think my grandfather drove a BMW 1600 until the rear of the car rusted away. I have owned a couple of Neue Klasse descendants myself. In 1998, I ordered a 318ti 'Sport Package' with a full length folding canvas sunroof. This turned out to be an especially rare configuration. The 'M sport' models differed from more proletariat models mostly by the addition of a badge labeled 'M' on the side.
I loved that car. It came to the US market in 1995 as the first BMW hatchback coupe in 21 years. Its grandfather was the BMW 1802 Touring -- a Neue Klasse car. Chronic sunroof leaks in the rare canvas roof ('rare', 'canvas', and 'roof' in once sentence are a recipe for dampness, by the way) fed a mold invasion. The car was so great that I drove it even when it gave me a damp bum from wet seats. I gave it away ten years later when my first child was born.
I have missed that car since. I flew to Cleveland last year to buy a used BMW wagon to replace a Miata. Wonderful car. I was so nostalgic for hatch-backed BMW motoring fun that I overlooked the obvious. Cleveland cars rust. My wagon has superficial body rust that does not bother me. It also has extensive rear suspension rust that make some simple, now necessary, repairs expensive.
Out with the old, in with the new. My long experience with these Neue Klasse cars and their descendants is probably over. It ended, strangely, with the purchase of another new BMW.
I recently bought a new BMW i3 electric car. This car shares essentially nothing but a badge with the rest of the BMW cars on the show floor today. It is a marvel. Alien though it appears, it too has ancestors in the BMW family tree.
Before the Neue Klasse was Neue, The BMW 700 coupe was the new new thing. The 700 was a small, rear-engined car that helped pull BMW out of a financial crisis and put it on the path to the introduction of the Neue Klasse. 700-series cars continued in production until they were replaced by the affordable '02' series of Neue Klasse coupes.
The 700 was BMW's first monocoque car. It would be BMW's last rear-engined car for almost 50 years. It would be BMW's last car with a motorcycle-derived engine for the same period. Some argue that BMW exited the economy car market when 700 sales ended. I can't argue with that.
I will argue a more outlandish thing. I think BMW has just reentered the economy car market with a car that is a direct spiritual descendant of the BMW 700. The new i3 is the first mass produced BMW with a totally new chassis -- aluminum and carbon fibre reinforced plastic -- since the monocoque 700. The new i3, in the range extended form I bought, also features a motorcycle engine in the rear just like the 700.
The i3 clearly differs from the 700. It's an electric car that looks like a spaceship. The BMW 700 was remarkable for making a motorcycle-engined car look surprisingly normal. The 700 was an economy car and the i3 starts at 42 thousand dollars. I think there is a marvelous economy car hiding behind that luxury price tag.
For many buyers, ten thousand dollars of that price tag will come off the top as federal, state, and local tax incentives. A 42 thousand dollar car becomes a 32 thousand dollar car. From there, a substantial economy will come from very low operating costs. My BMW wagon generated a monthly gas bill of $250. My Prius would shred that bill into a $125 charge. The i3 will turn it into perhaps $60 in electricity and a few bucks in gas.
The gas bill is nice, but the i3 offers a battery only about as large as the battery in the much cheaper Nissan Leaf. How is the BMW car the economy choice at a ten thousand dollar premium over the Leaf?
It isn't today. I would have to be smoking the finest grade first-world hemp upholstery (which the i3 features, by the way) to claim otherwise. It appears that no expense has been spared in the design of the car. The carbon fiber body is remarkable. Here's another remarkable tidbit missed in most of the road tests -- the radio on the base car has an 'iDrive' menu with one screen for 'tone'. Treble, bass, and balance. That's it. Not even the fade control present on my 1983 Mercury Lynx. Why no fade? I think there aren't even rear speakers! The rear doors don't lock or even have external door handles. Rear windows don't open either.
There is no elaborate ducting to move conditioned air to the rear passengers. Instead, the low profile seats work together with the flat cabin floor to let air circulate from just a few registers.
I truly admire BMW's principled restraint here. The base i3 lacks many little geegaws that are standard even on low end econoboxes. Unlike those cars, it features a spacious rear seat and comfort for four adults. Every gadget present is lightweight, energy efficient, or especially meaningful in an electric car.
There is a brilliant twenty thousand dollar car waiting to emerge from this car when it next molts. I get some push back from self-styled BMW purists on this point. Some seem threatened by the idea of a cheap BMW. I heard it all when I owned the 318ti -- BMW's last car in the U.S. available for less than twenty thousand dollars. I disagree. The 2002 was an inexpensive car. Here's how Car and Driver summarized that ride in 1968:
I can't summon better language to describe the new BMW i3. The 2002 used 114 horsepower to wind a two thousand pound car around a mountain the way a yoyo ascends its string. The i3 uses 170-hp/184 ft-lb AC motor to spin its twenty eight hundred pounds just the same way. The two cars share a bolt upright seating position, an airy greenhouse, and the same power to weight ratio. The i3 has better brakes and better tires. Fifty years of material science has conjured a revolution there that rivals the miracle of a 22 kWh lithium ion battery pack. Remarkably, the i3 has the lower center of gravity.
The 2002 listed for $2850 in '68. That target was just twenty bucks above the average new car price. Fast forward to 2014 and the base i3 -- with tax credits -- stickers for only hundreds dollars above the 2013 average new vehicle price of 32 thousand dollars.
The problem with that happy equivalence is that an average new car is unaffordable for average Americans. The other problem is that gas doesn't cost 1968's 34 cents a gallon. I think that BMW can kill two birds with one stone. The i3 lays a technological framework for an excellent and affordable car priced in the twenties. Its efficient drivetrain can deliver energy bills straight out of the sixties.
I am enjoying my new front row seat. It's upright with great, tall windows all around. I may not be able to see in every direction, but the past and the future look pretty clear from here.
BMW introduced the 1500 sedan in the fall of 1962. This was the first of the 'Neue Klasse' cars, and the first of a line from which most modern BMW cars can trace their lineage. 1500 begat 1600, 1800, and 2000 cars. These sedans, in turn, begat the BMW 5 series cars. The 1600 also begat the 1602 and 2002 cars that became the BMW 3 series.
Of all the Neue Klasse cars, none stand out more in popular automotive mythology than the 2002. That car may be the one that established BMW as a sporting line in the mind of the American driver. It spawned performance versions, the 2002tii and 2002 Turbo, that are the grandparents of BMW's storied M3.
I think my grandfather drove a BMW 1600 until the rear of the car rusted away. I have owned a couple of Neue Klasse descendants myself. In 1998, I ordered a 318ti 'Sport Package' with a full length folding canvas sunroof. This turned out to be an especially rare configuration. The 'M sport' models differed from more proletariat models mostly by the addition of a badge labeled 'M' on the side.
I loved that car. It came to the US market in 1995 as the first BMW hatchback coupe in 21 years. Its grandfather was the BMW 1802 Touring -- a Neue Klasse car. Chronic sunroof leaks in the rare canvas roof ('rare', 'canvas', and 'roof' in once sentence are a recipe for dampness, by the way) fed a mold invasion. The car was so great that I drove it even when it gave me a damp bum from wet seats. I gave it away ten years later when my first child was born.
I have missed that car since. I flew to Cleveland last year to buy a used BMW wagon to replace a Miata. Wonderful car. I was so nostalgic for hatch-backed BMW motoring fun that I overlooked the obvious. Cleveland cars rust. My wagon has superficial body rust that does not bother me. It also has extensive rear suspension rust that make some simple, now necessary, repairs expensive.
Out with the old, in with the new. My long experience with these Neue Klasse cars and their descendants is probably over. It ended, strangely, with the purchase of another new BMW.
I recently bought a new BMW i3 electric car. This car shares essentially nothing but a badge with the rest of the BMW cars on the show floor today. It is a marvel. Alien though it appears, it too has ancestors in the BMW family tree.
Before the Neue Klasse was Neue, The BMW 700 coupe was the new new thing. The 700 was a small, rear-engined car that helped pull BMW out of a financial crisis and put it on the path to the introduction of the Neue Klasse. 700-series cars continued in production until they were replaced by the affordable '02' series of Neue Klasse coupes.
The 700 was BMW's first monocoque car. It would be BMW's last rear-engined car for almost 50 years. It would be BMW's last car with a motorcycle-derived engine for the same period. Some argue that BMW exited the economy car market when 700 sales ended. I can't argue with that.
I will argue a more outlandish thing. I think BMW has just reentered the economy car market with a car that is a direct spiritual descendant of the BMW 700. The new i3 is the first mass produced BMW with a totally new chassis -- aluminum and carbon fibre reinforced plastic -- since the monocoque 700. The new i3, in the range extended form I bought, also features a motorcycle engine in the rear just like the 700.
The i3 clearly differs from the 700. It's an electric car that looks like a spaceship. The BMW 700 was remarkable for making a motorcycle-engined car look surprisingly normal. The 700 was an economy car and the i3 starts at 42 thousand dollars. I think there is a marvelous economy car hiding behind that luxury price tag.
For many buyers, ten thousand dollars of that price tag will come off the top as federal, state, and local tax incentives. A 42 thousand dollar car becomes a 32 thousand dollar car. From there, a substantial economy will come from very low operating costs. My BMW wagon generated a monthly gas bill of $250. My Prius would shred that bill into a $125 charge. The i3 will turn it into perhaps $60 in electricity and a few bucks in gas.
The gas bill is nice, but the i3 offers a battery only about as large as the battery in the much cheaper Nissan Leaf. How is the BMW car the economy choice at a ten thousand dollar premium over the Leaf?
It isn't today. I would have to be smoking the finest grade first-world hemp upholstery (which the i3 features, by the way) to claim otherwise. It appears that no expense has been spared in the design of the car. The carbon fiber body is remarkable. Here's another remarkable tidbit missed in most of the road tests -- the radio on the base car has an 'iDrive' menu with one screen for 'tone'. Treble, bass, and balance. That's it. Not even the fade control present on my 1983 Mercury Lynx. Why no fade? I think there aren't even rear speakers! The rear doors don't lock or even have external door handles. Rear windows don't open either.
There is no elaborate ducting to move conditioned air to the rear passengers. Instead, the low profile seats work together with the flat cabin floor to let air circulate from just a few registers.
I truly admire BMW's principled restraint here. The base i3 lacks many little geegaws that are standard even on low end econoboxes. Unlike those cars, it features a spacious rear seat and comfort for four adults. Every gadget present is lightweight, energy efficient, or especially meaningful in an electric car.
There is a brilliant twenty thousand dollar car waiting to emerge from this car when it next molts. I get some push back from self-styled BMW purists on this point. Some seem threatened by the idea of a cheap BMW. I heard it all when I owned the 318ti -- BMW's last car in the U.S. available for less than twenty thousand dollars. I disagree. The 2002 was an inexpensive car. Here's how Car and Driver summarized that ride in 1968:
"To my way of thinking, the 2002 is one of modern civilization's all-time best ways to get somewhere sitting down. It grabs you. You sit in magnificently-adjustable seats with great, tall windows all around you. You are comfortable and you can see in every direction. You start it. Willing and un-lumpy is how it feels. No rough idle, no zappy noises to indicate that the task you propose might be anything more than child's play for all those 114 Bavarian superhorses."
-- from Car and Driver's 1968 review of the BMW 2002
I can't summon better language to describe the new BMW i3. The 2002 used 114 horsepower to wind a two thousand pound car around a mountain the way a yoyo ascends its string. The i3 uses 170-hp/184 ft-lb AC motor to spin its twenty eight hundred pounds just the same way. The two cars share a bolt upright seating position, an airy greenhouse, and the same power to weight ratio. The i3 has better brakes and better tires. Fifty years of material science has conjured a revolution there that rivals the miracle of a 22 kWh lithium ion battery pack. Remarkably, the i3 has the lower center of gravity.
The 2002 listed for $2850 in '68. That target was just twenty bucks above the average new car price. Fast forward to 2014 and the base i3 -- with tax credits -- stickers for only hundreds dollars above the 2013 average new vehicle price of 32 thousand dollars.
The problem with that happy equivalence is that an average new car is unaffordable for average Americans. The other problem is that gas doesn't cost 1968's 34 cents a gallon. I think that BMW can kill two birds with one stone. The i3 lays a technological framework for an excellent and affordable car priced in the twenties. Its efficient drivetrain can deliver energy bills straight out of the sixties.
I am enjoying my new front row seat. It's upright with great, tall windows all around. I may not be able to see in every direction, but the past and the future look pretty clear from here.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
unwired
In the beginning there was the modem. Then came ISDN. Then came DSL. That progression captures my landline data technology from about 1985 to last month.
My mobile data technology has been through many more iterations. Analog PCMCIA modems with AMPS phones in the early 1990s. 9600 baud digital data with GSM in 1996. 19.2k baud IP with CDPD. On to Richochet. Back to 56k data with GPRS, then EDGE. I took a step away from GSM with the CDMA Novatel MiFi 2200, then a step back to GSM with a T-Mobile UMTS phone, then another step away from GSM with a CDMA iPhone 4S on Verizon, then a step back towards GSM with an iPad with LTE, and now an iPhone 5S, on Verizon.
My mobile speed went from 2.4 kbps to 30 Mbps in 20 years. My landline speed went from 300bps to 6Mbps in 30 years. A factor of a ten thousand in twenty years for mobile -- and only twenty thousand in thirty years for landline. The wireless performance trend line is spanking the wired line here at my house.
Of course, performance is not the only parameter worth considering. Reliability has also set wireless and wired apart. Reliability drove me away from DSL last month and into the embrace of Verizon Wireless as my sole ISP. My DSL reliability was never better than the reliability of the low quality, vulnerable, DSL modem of the month. I owned a string of modems and all required more reboots than my iPhone.
Reliability is the reason I moved from T-Mobile's US network to Verizon's much slower CDMA network in the iPhone 4S era. I was in Maryland for the 2011 East Coast earthquake and I got a front row seat for what is possibly the best dress rehearsal for a natural disaster or terrorist attack. Verizon Wireless did just fine. The wireless carriers rebounded quickly from 2012's 'Sandy' attack, though Verizon earned scorn from many for its decision to abandon copper service lines on New York's Fire Island.
Price per megabyte is not there yet for mobile. I now pay Verizon $225 a month for 30GB. DSL cost me $90 for unmetered access. Before this, though, I paid Verizon $70 for 4GB that my wife and I used little of on our phones. My marginal additional cost for using Verizon for the home connection is $155.
A premium today, certainly, but my cellular data bill has been falling over time. My DSL bill was about the same for ten years.
Cellular disrupting landline is an old story. Classic "Innovator's Dilemma" stuff. The upstart technology finds a customer that values a new attribute of the challenger -- mobility in this case -- and uses that revenue to grow the technology until it can displace the incumbent.
In my case, the thing I value isn't mobility. I value never needing to schedule an appointment for the Verizon wireless guy to visit my house. I can solve essentially any problem with a visit to the mall instead of waiting for a guy to show up at my house. Even the trickiest problem could be solved by cruising over to the other end of the mall and talking to the AT&T guy instead. At the time of writing, AT&T was offering 30GB for the same price as Verizon.
On the day I went to the mall to replace DSL with cellular, Verizon was not my first stop. I first popped into the T-Mobile shop to get a modern MiFi and an unlimited plan. T-Mobile reps told me that I couldn't tether on an unlimited plan. I understand. I moved on.
I don't want unlimited. I want a reasonable monthly bill and no surprises. Verizon has been very good about managing my surprise. I started first with a 20GB plan. A Netflix binge put me a few gigabytes over my limit. Verizon's usage monitoring warned me at 75%, at 90%, and the end, and after every additional gigabyte. I responded 'YES' to one of the messages and upgraded my plan to 30GB with a text message. No surprises.
One welcome surprise has been the revolution in overage charges. I remember days when overages were measured, and billed, by the kilobyte at absurd penalty rates. Today, a gigabyte of overage costs only double the base plan rate. An hour of Netflix overage at 1 GB/hr works out to $.25/min. That's cheaper than the typical $.40/min voice minute overage rate that still exists on some carriers.
One other surprise has been my change in behavior. I no longer moderate my data usage while out. It's now the same data from the same plan when I'm at home. I no longer bother with with free WiFi in public. I no longer regard the ugly black phone wires that slink from my house to a street pole as a necessary evil.
I wonder which wire I can cut next.
My mobile data technology has been through many more iterations. Analog PCMCIA modems with AMPS phones in the early 1990s. 9600 baud digital data with GSM in 1996. 19.2k baud IP with CDPD. On to Richochet. Back to 56k data with GPRS, then EDGE. I took a step away from GSM with the CDMA Novatel MiFi 2200, then a step back to GSM with a T-Mobile UMTS phone, then another step away from GSM with a CDMA iPhone 4S on Verizon, then a step back towards GSM with an iPad with LTE, and now an iPhone 5S, on Verizon.
My mobile speed went from 2.4 kbps to 30 Mbps in 20 years. My landline speed went from 300bps to 6Mbps in 30 years. A factor of a ten thousand in twenty years for mobile -- and only twenty thousand in thirty years for landline. The wireless performance trend line is spanking the wired line here at my house.
Of course, performance is not the only parameter worth considering. Reliability has also set wireless and wired apart. Reliability drove me away from DSL last month and into the embrace of Verizon Wireless as my sole ISP. My DSL reliability was never better than the reliability of the low quality, vulnerable, DSL modem of the month. I owned a string of modems and all required more reboots than my iPhone.
Reliability is the reason I moved from T-Mobile's US network to Verizon's much slower CDMA network in the iPhone 4S era. I was in Maryland for the 2011 East Coast earthquake and I got a front row seat for what is possibly the best dress rehearsal for a natural disaster or terrorist attack. Verizon Wireless did just fine. The wireless carriers rebounded quickly from 2012's 'Sandy' attack, though Verizon earned scorn from many for its decision to abandon copper service lines on New York's Fire Island.
Price per megabyte is not there yet for mobile. I now pay Verizon $225 a month for 30GB. DSL cost me $90 for unmetered access. Before this, though, I paid Verizon $70 for 4GB that my wife and I used little of on our phones. My marginal additional cost for using Verizon for the home connection is $155.
A premium today, certainly, but my cellular data bill has been falling over time. My DSL bill was about the same for ten years.
Cellular disrupting landline is an old story. Classic "Innovator's Dilemma" stuff. The upstart technology finds a customer that values a new attribute of the challenger -- mobility in this case -- and uses that revenue to grow the technology until it can displace the incumbent.
In my case, the thing I value isn't mobility. I value never needing to schedule an appointment for the Verizon wireless guy to visit my house. I can solve essentially any problem with a visit to the mall instead of waiting for a guy to show up at my house. Even the trickiest problem could be solved by cruising over to the other end of the mall and talking to the AT&T guy instead. At the time of writing, AT&T was offering 30GB for the same price as Verizon.
On the day I went to the mall to replace DSL with cellular, Verizon was not my first stop. I first popped into the T-Mobile shop to get a modern MiFi and an unlimited plan. T-Mobile reps told me that I couldn't tether on an unlimited plan. I understand. I moved on.
I don't want unlimited. I want a reasonable monthly bill and no surprises. Verizon has been very good about managing my surprise. I started first with a 20GB plan. A Netflix binge put me a few gigabytes over my limit. Verizon's usage monitoring warned me at 75%, at 90%, and the end, and after every additional gigabyte. I responded 'YES' to one of the messages and upgraded my plan to 30GB with a text message. No surprises.
One welcome surprise has been the revolution in overage charges. I remember days when overages were measured, and billed, by the kilobyte at absurd penalty rates. Today, a gigabyte of overage costs only double the base plan rate. An hour of Netflix overage at 1 GB/hr works out to $.25/min. That's cheaper than the typical $.40/min voice minute overage rate that still exists on some carriers.
One other surprise has been my change in behavior. I no longer moderate my data usage while out. It's now the same data from the same plan when I'm at home. I no longer bother with with free WiFi in public. I no longer regard the ugly black phone wires that slink from my house to a street pole as a necessary evil.
I wonder which wire I can cut next.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
logo
I recently inherited some technical books from a close friend. Among them was Seymour Papert's 'Mindstorms' -- a book about the history of the logo language. I recalled with fondness my own experiences with logo in the heydey of the great 8 bit age.
I built a little one for my daughter. It is here.
try:
do 20 [ fd 20 rt 18 ]
to star [ do 5 [ fd 70 rt 144 ] ]
do 5 [ star pu fd 90 pd ]
It will grow as she outgrows its limits. I do not know if I will be able to keep up.
(update 7 Aug 2014)
this logo now generates GPGL cameo output with the 'cameo' command
It will grow as she outgrows its limits. I do not know if I will be able to keep up.
(update 7 Aug 2014)
this logo now generates GPGL cameo output with the 'cameo' command
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
mutually assured destruction
I have a large and growing collection of e-waste. One special neighborhood in this zip code of waste is reserved just for dead or dying gadgets that hold my personal information. The pile grows because I don't have good protocols for scrubbing this junk before it heads out the door for its date with an acid bath, a makeshift furnace attended by orphans, or an identity theft gang in Southeast Asia. They don't ask which you prefer at the ewaste drop-off.
My hard drives usually get destroyed. A wifi router might get its settings wiped. I have a harder time with things that seem like they ought to be useful. I recently had four Macs that fit this bill. All worked but none really made any sense as a computer. All were 'modern' Intel Macs though two were 32-bit-only Core Duos. MagSafe plugs were fraying. Batteries shot. Fluorescent backlights dim.
All these Macs had hard drives that are tedious at best to remove for erasure or destruction. Fortunately, all also had FireWire and all supported Apple's fabulous Target Disk Mode. Hold 'T' at power on and the Mac exports its internal drives to another Mac over FireWire as if they were external disks. I used one of the Macs to wipe the drives of the other three. I installed a clean Mac OS on one of the wiped machines and turned it around to wipe the fourth.
This cyclic graph of destruction was not simply for show. While these Macs all had FireWire, none of my present Mac laptops do. These machines would have to wipe themselves. The arrangement sounds cumbersome but the outcome was ideal. I was able to recycle these machines as working computers rather than as pure waste.
This cyclic graph of destruction was not simply for show. While these Macs all had FireWire, none of my present Mac laptops do. These machines would have to wipe themselves. The arrangement sounds cumbersome but the outcome was ideal. I was able to recycle these machines as working computers rather than as pure waste.
I would be even happier if these Macs, and all phones, tablets, and computers, came with a 'donate me' mode in firmware that could give me some assurance that the device has been actually wiped. An article chosen at random from the Google suggests that these machines might take on average 4000 MJ of energy each to make. A million watt hours. Twenty thousand hours at 50 watts. I don't expect any of my old machines, or phones, could forestall the production of their replacement if re-used. I would still like the best shot at it. Perhaps future revisions of the 'Energy Star' program could include mandates designed to simplify responsible reuse.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
big ass brother
In November I wrote a three part review of the Haiku fan from Big Ass Fans. I love the fan, but I had some complaints about the clumsy remote and the dim lamp. That review ends with:
The folks at Big Ass have now come to the same conclusion. They have a new model out with 'SenseME' technology. What is SenseME? It looks like a module that replaces the lame lamp with the equivalent of a Nest thermostat.
I have a guess that the fan motherboard is unchanged and that the SenseME module plugs into the same header as the RF remote receiver.
SenseME is still in pre-launch. I wonder if they will work out some kind of revenue split with users over the monetization of your home occupancy data. Maybe they will just knock a hundred dollars of the list price up front. Maybe they'll find it easier to just keep the money.
In any case, I have two suggestions for Big Ass. The first is to go license "See Me, Feel Me" from The Who for your SenseME campaign. The second is to take a moment and consider a brand pivot. This could be the moment to transition away from fans and become Big Ass Brother. Why not just admit up front what we all suspect about the current connected home insanity? Your existing brand concept slaps a folksy, colloquial label on a plain fact -- big fans. Let's do the same thing for the Internet of Things that Spy on You (IoTtSoY). Big Ass Brother.
If Nest can solve the user interface challenge of configuring a wifi smoke detector on your ceiling, then it must be possible for a ceiling fan.
The folks at Big Ass have now come to the same conclusion. They have a new model out with 'SenseME' technology. What is SenseME? It looks like a module that replaces the lame lamp with the equivalent of a Nest thermostat.
I have a guess that the fan motherboard is unchanged and that the SenseME module plugs into the same header as the RF remote receiver.
SenseME is still in pre-launch. I wonder if they will work out some kind of revenue split with users over the monetization of your home occupancy data. Maybe they will just knock a hundred dollars of the list price up front. Maybe they'll find it easier to just keep the money.
In any case, I have two suggestions for Big Ass. The first is to go license "See Me, Feel Me" from The Who for your SenseME campaign. The second is to take a moment and consider a brand pivot. This could be the moment to transition away from fans and become Big Ass Brother. Why not just admit up front what we all suspect about the current connected home insanity? Your existing brand concept slaps a folksy, colloquial label on a plain fact -- big fans. Let's do the same thing for the Internet of Things that Spy on You (IoTtSoY). Big Ass Brother.
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I can't spare the phone for reography this morning. I need it for train updates and electronic boarding passes and even a phone call if everything else goes wrong. I can't use the camera for reography. This tablet doesn't really have a role in my day to day life. I didn't even realize it was in my bag until last night.
I bought the tablet to play with HTML5 media APIs in Chrome and Firefox. I leave it stock and use only those apps. I load nothing else and I use no personal accounts. On this trip, the tablet is essentially disconnected. My phone's hotspot feature disappeared when I bought the wrong local SIM.
In the plus column, Quickoffice does rotate from portrait to landscape. Moses' tablets didn't. In the minus column, the landscape interface is apalling. The keyboard takes up a lot of space. Fine.
Quickoffice trashes an astonishing fraction of the balance with a pointless and unwelcome interface ribbon. Above my editing slit now is a giant blue 'W' to remind me that I'm editing a document and not a spreadsheet. The name of the document is up there. It probably takes up as much space as the letter 'Q' on the keyboard and isn't quite as useful. Below the name are 25 characters telling me that my document is not saved. Next comes an enormous swath of empty space. Then a picture of a 3.5" floppy diskette. I'm old enough to read that rune but I don't know who else is. Then come mystery buttons. Those runes elude me. I suspect at least one to be a booby trap.
Photo courtesy your correspondent
I never had a Tandy 100 portable. I didn't see one on the museum shelves but I saw a number of similarly elegant portables from the era. I have nothing but respect for the nexus tablet hardware, but I wonder if it would be put to a better use emulating the model 100 than running Quickoffice. The nexus tablet is simply not ready for battle as it comes out of the box.