Bash Modern Quantity

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[thomasqbrady]

Craft Punk

A few years ago I started a new family tradition of making homemade Halloween costumes with my son, Liam.

No, not like

Okay, I’ll skip to the finished products from the first couple years. Year one, a Creeper, from Minecraft:

I don’t even remember what started this tradition. I don’t remember whose idea it was, or how I decided to use cardboard as my medium (though that’s pretty much the most obvious decision ever), but I do remember how much fun it was working with cardboard. I found it to be most of the pleasure of 3D printing, without as much waiting and/or disappointment.

So the first year was pretty basic. Sadly, Liam got sick on Halloween that year and didn't get to actually go out in it. He did get to answer the door for trick-or-treaters, at least.

The second year we upped our game a bit. This one features glowing eyes, and a web app for his phone that randomly plays Enderman sound effects.

The Stakes Keep Getting Higher

This year, though… this year… my wife says to me, she says, “Hey, I know! You and Liam should go as Daft Punk.

💀

I have drooled over Daft Punk helmets on Etsy for years. There’s a wide range of helmets available, from the ludicrously simplified children’s toys (that still manage a $150 price-tag) to the exquisite, as-good-as-the-originals, thousands of dollars kinds of affairs.

None of them looked plausible as a home project made with cardboard.

I searched. I watched YouTube videos. I found myself prostrate at the feet of a new teacher named the “Dali Lomo.” Oh man is this one awesome blog.

So, for obvious reasons (the opportunity for irony), Liam was assigned the Thomas mask, and I got the Guy-Manuel mask.

Thomas

I immediately set to work on Liam’s mask, which I figure was going to be the harder of the two. It seemed to me that the fidelity of the chrome of his mask was critical, and the hardest thing to accomplish. It meant that the “dome” needed to be immaculate. The Dali Lomo’s build guide involved making a dome out of cardboard (which sounds right up my alley), but also involves a ton of Bondo. I opted out of this, thinking that starting with a batting helmet would save me some time. I went to the local sporting goods store, and found this beauty on sale:

I think the helmet did save me some time, but nowhere near as much as I’d thought it would. What it did do for this project is add a lot of rigidity and durability to the mask, and give us a comfortable, head-shaped base from which to start. Before I was done, I’d cut a couple inches off the back of the helmet, cut the visor off the front, and cut the ears out. I also had to (my wife would probably like me to say “I chose to) fill in the vents with Bondo, so I didn’t entirely escape having to deal with Bondo (my first time—it’s kinda fun!).

I filled the gaps between the matboard visor pieces and the batting helmet with Sugru, by the way. I was quite concerned the paint wouldn't stick, as they claim you can't easily paint Sugru in their packaging. The Rustoleum primer I used is oil-based, which I think helped, and I put several coats on before painting the chrome on, and it worked quite well.

The first paint I tried was Krylong Looking-Glass Silver. This did not work well at all.

A bunch more sanding, and a new coat of Krylon Premium Metallic Chrome Original, and it looked like this:

Guy-Manuel

So, again, the Dali Lomo’s guide is fantastic.

One thing the Dali Lomo doesn't mention too emphatically in the YouTube videos for these masks is the difficulty in marrying up the two halves of the matboard masks. There's a seam that runs righ up the middle of the Guy-Manuel mask, and a similarly challenging seam along the left- and right-hand sides of the visor box on the Thomas mask that will split on you if you don't reinforce them well enough. Basically, you will marry up the edges of the two pieces, which means that you will need to glue each side to a piece of thin cardboard (we used cereal boxes). I initially put dots of hot glue at each of the four corners of the cereal box. This let the seam immediately split up when I bend the matboard. You need that seam to be super solid. So instead of a few dots, you basically need to cover the whole area, like this:

Now, when it came to the visor, I went my own way.

The Dali Lomo cut a plastic bowl into pieces, glued them back together in a slightly different shape, glued on a transparency sheet, Bondo’ed the seam, and then wrapped the whole thing in heat-shrinking sunscreen vinyl.

Yowza.

I started out trying to do the same thing. I bought an acrylic globe, which I thought was about the size of my noggin. I thought I would cut it in half, glue on a transparency sheet, and spray the inside of the assembly with Nite Shades (which the Dali Lomo said would probably be easier than the wrap method).

Turns out cutting acrylic is a frickin’ nightmare. Every time I tried to make a cut, cracks splintered out in every direction.

Also, it turned out that the globe was too wide for the mask body to hold.

Luckily it wasn’t expensive.

The problem was, it was now just days before Halloween, and I had no plan for how to make this visor. Luckily I’d been thinking about backup plans the whole time, and at some point I’d come across some blog posts (sorry, I can’t credit them… don’t remember whose they were) regarding Worbla. Yeah, WORE-BLAH. Say it 5 times as slow as you like. It’s just fun.

Worbla is a thermoplastic—a plastic that becomes moldable at certain temperatures, and returns to a hardened, sturdy state at room temperatures. Specifically, I found that they make a transparent version. Thankfully, while doing this research, I ordered a 3-pack of sample sheets of Worbla (9”x9”, roughly) from Amazon, that included just one sheet of transparent Worbla (sometimes called TranspArt).

So, I read up on how to work with transparent Worbla. Thankfully, in my searches, I found this post on Worbla’s site: Using TranspArt for Clear Domes.

Having read that, I went to Home Depot and found an 8 inch glass globe (a replacement for lamp-post covers, I think).

I made a circular jig (out of cardboard, my fave medium!) that had a diameter just about an inch longer than the globe itself, and a height that was about the radius of the globe (4 inches), taped the 9”x9” sheet of TranspArt to it, hit it with the heat gun for about 10 minutes (it’s best, I read, to slowly get to the desired temperature, lest you get discoloring and bubbles), and pushed the glass globe into the TranspArt. It looked a bit like this:

After about 15 minutes of cooling, I pulled the globe out, and it looked great! It took some careful wiggling to get the TranspArt off the glass globe (it was darn-near vacuum sealed to the thing), but once it was free I had a very clear semi-sphere, with a hoop skirt on...

Then I had to figure out how to make the curved-plane front portion of the visor. I went to an office supply store and tried to find transparency sheets. You remember those? Like the things you’d use with one of these:

I couldn’t find them there, so I bought some sort of self-adhesive clear sheets from Swingline (you know, like “that’s my stapler”?). Wrong. Too flimsy.

I visited several stores, trying to avoid the inevitable, but each place told me the same thing. “You should go over to Satan’s house. I think they have them there!” So I gave in, and I went to Hobby Lobby. I’m sorry. I really am.

At Hobby Lobby, in among the supplies for building model train set landscapes, I found transparent 8.5”x11” sheets of vinyl in various thicknesses. I got 0.7mm, and they were perfect. 2 sheets for $5. I DID find transparency sheets at one other office supply store, in my searches, but they were $40 for a pack of 50, and I had no idea how thick they would be.

I sprayed the inside of my clear dome and the transparency sheet, and they looked great. Perfect, dark, and well-matched. Now… how to attach them?

It was really hard to try to hold the dome in place just to figure out where to place it within the frame of the mask. I tried several ways to try to hold it in place to see if it would fit, and to try to figure out how to glue it in place safely. I had one shot. I checked. I would not be able to get any more Worbla in town, and if I ordered more from Amazon the soonest I could get it was November 2nd.

I searched the house (at about midnight), and found a 10-inch diameter inflatable beach ball. Deflated just a bit, it made the perfect clothes-horse for the dome. It held it in place just right while I traced the outline of where the dome met the frame, which let me then glue the appropriate spots one at a time by matching up the outline marks.

Then I curved the transparency sheet around the front of the dome, glued that in place… and I was done!

Final Note on the Thomas Visor

In hind sight (nota bene to the reader looking to make her own Guy-Manuel mask), I could have just glued the sides of the sheet to the frame of the mask. The seam where the transparency sheet met the dome would have not been secured, but I don’t think it would have mattered. What I did do was glue it there, with superglue, which dried white, and made the seam quite noticeable.

The Gloves

There’s not a lot to tell you about making the gloves, except to say, A) I did those, too, and B) they take longer than you think they will. There’s a lot of cutting involved, and most of it is rounded corners. One tip: cut out the template, and then re-arrange the individual segments of each finger so that all the straight edges between the segments touch. It's a lot faster this way, because you're turning two cuts (the top of one segment and the bottom of another) into one cut, which, for two sets of gloves, turns 80 cuts into 40.

The Results.

So, here’s where we ended up:

A Note on Visibility

One thing you might wonder, being the thoughtful reader you are, is "could you see while you were trick-or-treating, ostensibly in the dark in these things?"

I couldn't fit my head into my son's mask, but I'll say that he's not the most sure-footed kid in the world, and it was raining, and we were trick-or-treating after dark, and he never fell. He tripped a few times and very nearly ate it, but never actually fell.

My mask felt like wearing a motorcycle helmet with a tinted face shield, which is pretty siilar to wearing sunglasses (which cover your whole face). It wasn't super easy to see details, but I could get around well enough.

What This Project Meant to Me

I didn't know this the whole time I was working on this project, but some soul-searching and long conversations with my wife in the midst of it revealed something about my motivation to do this project. I grew up without a dad. My single mom bent and broke herself to make sure that I didn't feel that loss, that I had role models of all kinds, and that I didn't feel left out or different or weird because I didn't have a dad, and she did a great job of it.

But the thing I do notice, looking back, is that there were a lot of things that felt out of reach for me because I didn't have a parent that could walk me through those things. How to fix a car, for instance. I'm not saying only dads can do those sorts of things, but I am saying that in my childhood there was not a parent that filed that sort of role. I didn't study computer science in school, for instance, because it didn't occur to me that it was a profession that existed. I didn't have those sorts of professions modeled for me. Likewise design of any kind.

I wanted to do this with my son because I thought it would be fun. I thought it would be good to get him doing something with his hands. He didn't really get very involved this time, which is my fault. We didn't start early enough, so I didn't have time to let him fail a few times. A lot of the materials we were working with (super glue) and tools we were working with (mouse sander) were dangerous, too. My hope, though, and the thing that drove me to finish this, despite spending more than 30 hours on this over about 2.5 weeks, was that he would at least see me doing this. He would know "This is a thing people can do. Dad is not a costume-maker. If he can do it, maybe I can, too. Maybe Dad could even teach me."

Maybe we can get his little sister involved, too.

Here's to next year.

Happy (Belated) Halloween, dear reader!

[thomasqbrady]

On Pros and Studios

Steve Jobs, at D8, in 2013:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that's what you needed on a farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, and America started to move into those urban and then suburban centers, cars got more popular, and innovations like automatic transmission and power steering—things that you didn't care about in a truck, as much—started to become paramount in cars. And now... maybe 1 out of every 25 vehicles, 30 vehicles, is a truck; where it used to be 100 percent. PCs are going to be like trucks. They're still going to be around. They're still going to have a lot of value, but they're going to be used by 1 out of X people.

There's a part of this analogy that is as elusive as it is obvious: trucks serve a different purpose than cars. You can look at this analogy, and think of trucks as crude, early prototypes of cars—brutally practical manifestations of the idea of a steel and rubber beast of burden, propelled by exploding fossil fuels. The car, then, in this line of thinking, is the subtler, more refined embodiment of the automobile. The Truck 2.0.

But that's so far from the truth.

I think the main point in Jobs' poignant analogy is that trucks are "still going to be around." That they're "still going to have a lot of value." There are things you can do with a truck that you at least wouldn't want to, and often wouldn't be able to do with a car. They are hired for different jobs.

PC sales have steadily declined since we entered the "post-PC era," as Jobs declared in the video above, precisely because so many of the jobs that PCs used to get hired to do can be done on mobile devices, especially smartphones, today.

So, what's a PC manufacturer to do?

I live in, and grew up in, Texas. Something that has been simply part of the background of my life here, that I've learned is more than a little unusual in many other geographies, is trucks-as-daily-driven-vehicles. In Texas, driving down most streets and highways, you will pass a lot of trucks. Many of them will be dented and dirty, with work equipment, building materials, or smaller off-road vehicles filling their beds. Most of them, however, will be squeaky-clean, and shiny as the day they were stamped out of aluminum sheets.

I'm no expect, but I believe this is because in the early 90s, or perhaps even in the 80s, truck manufacturers learned that they could sell trucks as aspirational status symbols. Where some people aspire to be rich, and can be sold a Cadillac as a symbol of their dreams—even when they can't actually afford a Cadillac, thanks to the innovation of the automobile loan, others aspire to be seen as "tough," "hard-working," or, plainly, "cowboys" and "cowgirls." Once they figured out this market existed, the manufacturers started playing up the aspirational aspects of the vehicles, with ever-larger cabins, wheels, and chrome grills, while simultaneously adding more creature-comforts to the utilitarian vehicles, in everything from stair-steps to aid in getting into the vehicles to greater choice in paint styles and colors to high-end infotainment systems and multi-zone climate controls.

I see, daily, people driving around in gigantic trucks with wheels as tall as me, beds longer than my car, a mirror finish that says "I was waxed just yesterday," and a cover over the bed of the truck that says, "this space not intended for actual use." These trucks are hired to project an image, not to haul a load.

So, if you were a go-getter product manager at a PC manufacturer, and you were trying to figure out how to apply the lessons of the aspirational pickup truck to the PC industry, what might you do with/to the PC to elevate its aspirational appeal?

The World Economic Forum believes we're about to experience a 4th industrial revolution ("Forth?" I hear you saying. Yeah, I didn't know we'd had more than one either. By their count we had steam automation in 1748, mass production in 1870, and electronics and automation in 1969), one in which artificially intelligent agents consume a significant portion of the job market, potentially displacing human counterparts, or, optimistically, creating new opportunities for those human counterparts. The previous industrial revolution(s) saw several forms of what could be called "mindless labor" evaporate, leaving behind "craft" work and "thought" work. Machines can bend steel more efficiently than humans, but they can't, yet, compete with many forms handmade goods, nor can they design the form into which they're bending the steel. The modern thought-worker was born of the industrial revolution(s). Could this forth industrial revolution bring a new kind of work and worker with it? Will we soon see the dawn of the age of the "creative worker?"

Quick: what feature can you add to your computing device that really sells it as a "Pro" device?

Answer? Well, if you're Apple or Microsoft, it's apparently pen input.

Here's the lowly iPad:

And here's the mighty iPad Pro:

Here's Microsoft's Surface Pro:

And, of course there's the plain, old MacBook:

And the MacBook Pro:

[Record scratch]

Hold on...

Let's look back over at the Microsoft side of the fence, at their newest Surface devices. There's the Surface Hub:

The Surface Hub has two pens, so it's extra professional.

And, finally, we have the newest member of the family, the Surface Studio:

These last two eschew the "Pro" moniker for even more productivity-charged names like "Hub," which drips with collaborative clout, and "Studio," which evokes high ceilings, large, wooden desks with nearly nothing on them, and people in stylish clothes holding their chins and nodding.

I think all of these devices are going after the same market. They're all selling the image of the creative professional—the kind of outside-the-box thinker that will still have a job when yours has been stolen by a Slackbot.

So, why did Apple zig with the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro, when the rest of the industry (not to mention their own iPad line) zagged with pen input?

Let's evaluate these solutions on their merits as aspirational signals. When you see someone using an iPad with an Apple Pencil, you definitely get the impression that they are a "creative." They have the appearance of being an illustrator or architect right off the bat. Now, take away the Pencil, since they won't really be using it full-time. What do you have? You still have someone who looks like a "creative." They're using a tablet, when the vast majority uses a PC. They appear cutting-edge. They look like a digital native. It's a "second device," for most people anyway, an indication that after you bought your PC you had enough money leftover to also buy a tablet. The Pencil is a powerfully additive sigil, but the device starts out with a healthy dose of aspirational overtones.

The same is true, largely, of the Surface Pro.

And then there's the Studio. Picture its daily use, for someone who isn't an illustrator or architect. You know, like 98% of the people who will buy one. It will sit on their desk, in the upright position, with the pen either nowhere in sight or inconspicuously magnetized to the side of the screen. For all intents and purposes, it will look like a regular computer monitor. Like any other computer monitor. The aspirational quality has been drained. It's just a PC. If you pull out the pen and begin drawing, you skyrocket back to "rockstar comic book artist" status, unless it's painfully obvious that you're not an illustrator by the awkward way you tap around at the screen in its upright position.

When someone is actively using the Touch Bar on a new MacBook Pro, it looks more like they're playing a musical instrument than using a computer. And when they're not using the Touch Bar, it glows with an unmistakable call to action. Walk past one at a coffee shop and see how quickly your brain identifies it in your periphery. It may not be the best way to sell this image, but it's the best Apple came up with this go-round, and I'm sure they believe this is better than having simply added pen input.

Meanwhile, the internet piles up with critiques of Apple's PC lineup, especially the Mac Pro. Mark Gurman writes, in an article entitled "How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists ,"

While the Mac generates about 10 percent of Apple sales, the company can't afford to alienate professional designers and other business customers. After all, they helped fuel Apple's revival in the late 1990s. In a stinging critique, Peter Kirn, founder of a website for music and video creators, wrote: "This is a company with no real vision for what its most creative users actually do with their most advanced machines."

Apple has always sold aspirational computing devices. They've always been the brand of the "creative." In part this was because of the software that was offered on Macs. In part it was because Macs, with their greater user experience, weren't as nerdy as their Windows and Unix counterparts. In perhaps greater part, though, was the way Apple marketed their computers. They were always much better-looking. They were always more expensive. They were always advertised as the computer for the dreamer, the rugged individual, the "crazy ones." As the whole industry closes their focus on that market, Apple will get squeezed, forced to specialize within a niche of their own creation. This is no easy task. The Mac Pro was their first attempt—a desktop PC that was obviously designed for specific, creative use-cases, where its beefy and plentiful GPUs were as important as if not more important than it's CPUs. And whether you were using it to edit 4k video or edit a spreadsheet, you clearly looked creative while you were doing it, with the shiny, black sculpture on your desk. That didn't turn out to be enough to justify the hefty price tag.

The MacBook Pro is their second major attempt. The Touch Bar may or may not succeed where the "trash can" failed, but even if it does, there isn't a clear migration path for the Touch Bar to make its way to a desktop.

Perhaps the Mac Pro update is so late in coming because they're still trying to figure out how to build a better truck.

[thomasqbrady]

Jesus didn't run this year

So, as I sit here, it is November 14th, 2016. A portion of the United States, my homeland of all 38 years of my life, is beside themselves because of the decision our electoral college made just less than a week ago to elect Donald Trump president.

I won't go into my personal feelings in this post, as that sort of thing is not hard to find literally ANYWHERE right now, but I do have some things to say.

First off, this is my first (ever?) cross-post to Facebook. Hello former co-workers, family members, high-school friends, and others that I have not spoken to in ages. That's my fault. As @polotek pointed out on Twitter, my social network of choice (that's a double-entendre, right there), points out: I have isolated myself from many of you for too long, because I simply did not know how to talk to you about important issues on which we disagreed. And because I siloed myself amongst like-minded people, I was shocked last Tuesday night. Many people—people who have been less isolated, whether by choice or not—were not at all shocked, though perhaps disappointed, disillusioned, dispirited, or outrage enraged.

So I'm here. On purpose. To talk. To listen.

Not to try to tell you to vote like me in the future. Not blame you for voting how you did. Not to tell you how you're wrong, or find faults in your way of thinking. I do hope that we can try to fairly discuss things, that our politics can all be on the table. I will open my mind and try to be changeable if you will. And before you label me as "wishy-washy" or "lacking conviction," let me tell you why I want to try to open my mind.

There is no perfect policy

Let's start with something small… like a curfew rule in your household. Let's say you're a parent, and you have a 13-yr-old who wants to go out with friends to see a movie. You now, if you haven't already, have to come up with a curfew policy. You decide that your child needs to be home by 11 PM.

Done. Great work, policy-maker.

Fast-forward 6 months. Your child has honored this curfew, despite plenty of opportunity and temptation to break it. They've been working hard in extra-curricular activities, and their grades are great. All-around this is a great kid. And now they ask you if they can extend curfew, just this once, because there's a church/school/whatever-wholesome event that goes to 1 AM.

You've already found an exception to your curfew policy.

And then your 15-yr-old, who has had the same curfew, and has broken it many, many times, though not by a lot, and mostly because this kid isn't good at planning ahead, asks if they can go to a party that same night, and asks for the same curfew as their younger sibling: 1 AM. This child's grades are okay, but not great. This one doesn't seem to have "figured it out," yet.

Do you let the well-behaved child go to the church event until 1 AM and not let the older child go to the party until 1 AM?

This policy, its exceptions, discussions of its "spirit" and "letter" are getting complicated already. And it's just a curfew policy in your household of 4.

Scale that up to a whole nation, now.

An analogy

I can draw a circle, with a compass and pencil, with, say, a 3-inch diameter, that is, for all intents and purposes, perfect.

It is decidedly not, however, actually perfect.

To the naked eye, though, and in any practical sense, it's perfect.

If we scaled that penciled circle up as many times as we just scaled our curfew policy, when trying to make it a national policy, You could build whole cities in the breaks in the line where the lead missed a valley between paper fibers, and the circle was broken. Might rivers could flow between sections of the line and where they should be, had the compass not slipped a little, or the pencil tip worn down unevenly.

In fact, in the real world—in the real universe—there are no actual perfect circles. The idea of a "circle" is just that—an idea. They don't actually exist. Any circle we try to draw is just an ellipse, with very close vertices, and with imperfect arcs.

I feel the same is true of political policies. There is no perfect policy. And when you're operating at the scale that even state governments are, let alone national governments, little mistakes have a major impact. Policies designed to reward well-behaved citizens can easily create a vicious cycle that prevents overlooked citizens from breaking even, let alone getting ahead. Policies design to correct badly-behaved citizens can all-too-easily impact all of us, and all-too-often end up targeting specific sets of marginalized citizens.

So?

Am I saying we should give up on writing policy? No, not at all.

But I am saying that although we have put people on the moon, created pocket-sized computers that are literally millions of times faster than the computers used to put those people on the moon, and seem to be in the neighborhood of achievements like self-driving cars and manned missions to Mars, we have not, yet, created, and never will create a perfect policy.

So if you think your allegiance to your particular political persuasion is because they have such good policy, please think that through. It's unlikely that every policy coming out of the group you identify with is made of gold.

No perfect politician

Likewise, there are no perfect politicians. This seems a little more obvious, especially this year. So, so, so many people were voting for the "lesser of two evils." But it's a point worth making.

Jesus did not run for the office of president this year (hat tip to Science Mike for that thought).

So however excited you were about your candidate, please, please understand that he or she was not the "correct" choice. Again, I am not trying to force my liberal arts "everything is grey" thinking on you. I'm not arguing that they were all equal (for better or for worse). I'm arguing that, as sound as your logic may have been, you did not corner the market on "truth" by picking your candidate. There are valid reasons to have voted for any of these candidates.

Now, there were also valid reasons to not vote for any of these candidates.

This is why none of them was the "correct" choice. Jesus didn't run. Imperfect people did. Your measure of how good a choice any one of them was is not "correct." It's your best guess. It may be a very, very educated guess, but it's still a guess. We don't know these people (if you actually do know one of these candidates and you're reading this, please do reach out 🤓).

No perfect politics

So what are we left with? I think we're left with a spectrum of options. On the one end of the spectrum, you have a very conservative way to look at the world. On the other end you have a very liberal way to look at the world. Most people move toward the conservative end of that spectrum over the course of their life, no matter where they started.

Where's the right place to plant yourself?

There isn't one.

Again, I'm not espousing a relativistic "there's no wrong answer" mentality, here.

Borrowing from basically all of the pastors at my church, what I am saying is that we have to learn to live with a "healthy tension." I believe there are times when the conservatives have the best idea of how to handle a situation, because a conservative answer is the best answer. And I believe there are times when a liberal answer is best. And moderates, don't get too excited; this doens't mean you're "right," either, but you may be closest to this idea of living in healthy tension.

We need people from both ends of the spectrum—hell, from all along the spectrum, and we need them working together.

So you, dear reader, whoever you are, are someone I need to listen to. I can tell you right now that I respect you. It doesn't matter who you voted for; I respect you. Because we all deserve dignity and respect, and I do believe that we are all doing our best with what we've been dealt. So as much as I may disagree with you, I do respect you. And I want to talk about this stuff. I want people from both sides of the aisle (also, can we get a few more aisles, while we're at it?) uniting to call their representatives and voice their concerns. When we can work together to find policies that work for all of us, and politicians that can work together to represent all of us, that is when America will be great.

[thomasqbrady]

Apple Announces iPad Pro

Something struck me, looking at the photos of the new 12" Macbook today: maybe this is the origin of the iPad Pro rumor. I could definitely forgive someone for seeing this device and thinking it was an iPad:

First off, there are the color options. These are now standard issue iDevice colors: Silver, Space Gray, and Gold. Second, there's one port—one very Lightning-esque port—on the thing. Even the power supply that comes with it looks like like an iPad charger than a Macbook charger (yes, fair enough, the current 45W and up charges already looked pretty similar to the iPad charger, with the major difference that one had an integrated cable):

I don't think any of this is an accident, and I don't think it's just evidence of a strong visual language. Look at how Apple presents the purchase path for the new Macbook, different, mind you, from the purchase path for the also-newly-announced 13" Retina Macbook Pro:

Why, that looks precisely like the purchase path when buying an iPad (or iPhone)! Apple is definitely blurring the lines between iPad and Macbook here, and I think it's with the utmost intention. The only thing left is to run iOS, rather than OS X, on this thing, and then it IS an iPad (yeah, yeah, touch-screen, sensors, LTE modem). They've certainly made it easy for themselves. This machine, with this design, would make just as much sense running iOS on an ARM processor. They could swap in new models with those specs next March, and, while the roar of nerd confusion might be heard from space, the general press would barely notice a difference.

[thomasqbrady]

Now that's how you do a fashionable smartwatch

About two years ago [already? sheesh], I tried to build my own smartwatch. I wasn't so arrogant as to think I was going to figure out what the other market entrants hadn't; it was really just for fun. But I would be telling lies if I didn't admit that I thoguht I had an original angle. My thought was, a smartwatch is a losing proposition. Watches are jewelry. I don't wear any more jewelry on my fingers than my wedding band, and no more on my wrists or even my whole body than a watch, but even I have a handful of watches I swap out to fit my mood/clothing choices. Trying to replace that set of watches with a set of smart watches would be cost prohibitive, and trying to design a smartwatch that was configurable to the extent that it could adapt to my mood/wardrobe seems about as easy as designing a cold fusion device.

So my approach was to build a smart other accessory: an armband. Yes, I "innovated" by splitting hairs between an armband and a watch. But seriously, the idea was that you could wear this further up your arm, closer to your elbow, and keep it tucked away beneath your long-sleeved shirt. My hope was that a small LED matrix could be just bright enough that you could read your watch through your shirt, like some sort of spy.

Send your pre-order checks to... No? Okay. Well, it was a fun project. Couldn't get an LED matrix small enough, and the OLED screen I settled for wasn't bright enough to get through most shirts. Also, it was a dumb idea.

The fine folks at Montblanc, though, were a few thousands steps ahead of me (if a few years behind me—ouch), and figured out a much more elegant solution—potentially. They have come up with the smartwatch-band.

Oddly enough, there's no mention of this anywhere on montblanc.com, as of yet. This announcement apparently came at a tradeshow, covered by A Blog to Watch (get it?), which notes that this isn't the first design of this type on the market, actually.

A strap like this, that could be mated with your existing collection of watch faces, seems like a much more compelling design to actual watch-owners. I do have concerns, though, namely

Where is the battery? Can't possibly be big enough to last a reasonable amount of time.

That's the part of the watch that, for me at least, gets the most damage. How do you build something that's going to be robust, yet light, scratch-resistant, yet interactive (Apple's digital crown comes to mind)?

via MacRumors

[thomasqbrady]

A New Adventure...

Not quite two years ago I somehow sneaked in the back door at frog, the global product strategy and design firm that started when Steve Jobs convinced Hartmut Esslinger to create a firm in the US to create a product design language for the Macintosh.

Today was my last day.

It has been quite a ride. Oddly enough, the actual client work was, for the most part, not terribly interesting. It's not that frog doesn't do amazing work, I think, but that I was the new guy. I did get to do some cool stuff, and I definitely learned a ton doing client work, but it was, by far, the unbilled work that I did at frog that got me excited.

I've blogged about most of it, and will blog more of it soon.

I thrived at frog. It was an amazing place to work. I got to work alongside people like Jared Ficklin, Joshua Noble, Michael McDaniel and many more... It was the kind of workplace in which you can't help but hone your skills and practice your craft, surrounded all the time by people giving it their all. It's what I imagine it would be like to play professional sports.

It would take something pretty big to pry me away from such an environment. That thing was Reaction (site update coming very soon). Reaction was founded by Michael McDaniel, with whom I got to work quite a bit while we were both at frog. Reaction is a company that Michael started about 8 years ago, just days after Katrina made landfall in the U.S. Michael is from Mississippi, and he was compelled to do something to help those affected. Being a designer, with an industrial design background, he found his problem to solve in the short-term housing options available to FEMA when assisting those displaced from their homes. He designed The Exo as a better solution to the short-term housing problem. He explains it a heck of a lot better than I can (so far), so I'll step aside:

I'll be serving as technology director at Reaction, working on the hardware and software that will make these smart temporary houses that keep occupants safe and comfortable. You'll definitely be hearing more about all of this in the near future. I'm elated to be working on a product that I know is going to make a difference in the world.

That said, it is just now hitting me that I have left frog. I will miss frog, and all my colleagues, dearly. I have written frequently about the difficulty of creating and sustaining a culture of innovation and quality in a corporation, and I will probably spend a few years trying to figure out how frog did it.

[thomasqbrady]

"Draw a sky blue brain exploding"

I just don't even know how to put words to this one...

Natural language... programming?

Somehwere, Bret Victor is either sitting back looking proudly at something he secretly worked on, or he's weeping at its beauty. I guess both could be true.

If this is half as good as this demo video, I can't see how this won't upend the world of programming, the world of education... hell... the world.

[thomasqbrady]

The Electric Impspacebrewnoduino

I've been dying, ever since a couple of the core contributors visited frog Austin a little over a year ago, to play with Spacebrew, and in yet another skunkworks bit of hacking at work recently, I finally got to.

We, the secret snooping society, want to fill the Austin studio with sensors of varying type and scope, and we wanted it to be very easy for people, once they've found us out, to play along. This is a perfect fit for Spacebrew, which aims to make interactive spaces, exposing data via a simple API. One rig can be set up to be a data "publisher," and, without permission or help of any kind, anybody that can reach that server via a network/Internet connection can write a "subscriber" that can do whatever it likes with that data (usually, visualizing it).

As I was building this out (our project used a simple proximity sensor to track motion near the elevator, as a proxy to counting elevator trips), I realized that we also wanted historical data. Spacebrew is a super convenient way to provide real-time data, but it doesn't have any affordances for persisting data. So, I built a Node.js server that both acted as the Spacebrew publisher, via the javascript API, and write data to a mongoDB.

I also finally got to play with the Electric Imp, a nifty little WiFi-enabler.

You can read all about it, and get all the source code, on github, but here's a short walkthrough of how it works (from the "What does it do?" section of the project's README):

Use an Arduino to power a proximity sensor as a motion detector, and, when it sees motion, send a command over serial to an

Electric Imp, which throws an event over the Internet to

Electric Imp's cloud service, which we've configured to exposes an API that rolls up and reports these events upon HTTP GET, which

Our Node.js server polls, and upon finding new events, acts by both

Writing a record to a mongoDB and

Forwarding the event to

Spacebrew

Up to this point we have built a Spacebrew publisher, that happens to also persist data (something not typically included in Spacebrew).

We have also included an example Spacebrew subscriber, in the form of a web app that uses the Spacebrew javascript API in order to increment a count of movements observed. Our web app first polls our Node app to get a historical count for the day, and the timestamp of that last movement. The real-time Spacebrew updates then increment this historical count, and reset the last-movement-seen clock.

[thomasqbrady]

Øredev 2013 or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Talk

I am an unduly blessed person. My talk, "Shakespeare in Dev" from Øredev this year was, in part, about just that: how fortunate I've been. I mentioned, for instance, that I got my really-real start in "computers" due to a mix-up in paperwork. I was intended to be working in a warehouse, at Compaq, unboxing returned computers and putting them on a conveyor belt, from 11 PM to 7 AM. I didn't escape the night-shift, but the paperwork mix-up did put me on the other end of that conveyor belt, in charge of refurbishing the returned computers. I had not seen the inside of a computer, but for a brief experiment in swapping the 5.25" floppy drive in my 486SX for a 3.5" floppy drive, about ten years earlier.

A similar opportunity came about six months ago. Co-worker Jesse Cravens asked me if I'd be interested in co-writing a book with him about Ember JS, a book we're hoping to have finished before year's end. That, and Jesse's extensive conference speaking experience (he's done 12 this year, and he's not done), led Øredev to invite him to speak at their conference this year. Jesse was kind enough to ask if they'd be interested in having the two of us co-present on our book, and the Øredev organizers were beyond kind in extending the invitation to include me.

They like to ask their speakers, many of whom they're flying into Sweden from all over the world, to do two talks, so as to get their money's worth. The theme of the conference this year was "The Arts," the corollaries between the programmer's craft and the artist's, as well as the pure inspiration that could be drawn from the arts.

I submitted a few ideas for talks that I could do, trying to stick to that theme, and the one they chose was "Shakespeare in Dev." It was pitched as a survey, a crash-course in the user of story-telling in user experience/interaction design.

The trouble was, right off the bat, I felt like a fraud. I have some experience. I have some knowledge. But I didn't feel like I would be able to talk for 50 minutes to a crowd of people who could easily be ten times as knowledgable and experienced in user experience design. I decided I would study up. I'd pick up all the books, and become an expert over the summer.

To start, this was a bad plan. This was a really bad plan. I have two children and a full-time job for Pete's sake. I barely had time to write a talk—I didn't, really, let alone read 15 books first and then write a talk. Not to mention that part-way into this time period, I decided to take on some freelance work. Goodbye free time.

This worked out for the best, though. If I had found or made the time to read all 15 books and synthesized them into a succinct overview of the topic of story-telling as a design tool, I would have succeeded in creating a painfully boring talk. It might have been insightful. It might have been well-informed. It would have been boring. I wouldn't have provided much, if anything, that the audience couldn't have had by reading the same books.

Thankfully, at the last minute (I finally finished up my freelance work just a couple weeks before the conference), inspiration struck. I realized that the aspect of story-telling that was most interesting to me was the fact that it's a discipline-agnostic tool. It's not a super-specialized tool that you have to spend years honing in order to be good at it. It's not like oil-painting, or using Photoshop, or mastering object-oriented programming. I believe it's a nearly universal skill to all humans. Some of us are better at it than others, and you certainly can hone it to become a skill like oil-painting. But at basic proficiency, the average person can tell a story that can have a profound impact on the world around them.

I was interested in how this could affect the dynamic among a team working on a software project. It's difficult for everyone on the project to have an impact, or to even participate in the same discussion, much of the time. Story, I thought, might be just the thing, just the tool—one that everyone on the team can implement with roughly equivalent skill—to be shared by the whole team, giving everyone equal impact on the work to be done.

While I was thinking about all of this, I reflected on my own career, on the saga of developer versus designer versus QA reviewer versus project manager. I remembered the day it all clicked, the day it all began to make sense to me, because of something a designer named Michael Chang said to me, a story he'd told me.

That was it!

I started over, after spending four or five nights on the talk, about half the time I had left. But I felt hopeful, now, finally, that I had something to say. If I'm telling my own story, there's no right or wrong. There's nobody with more expertise in the room on the topic. And, best of all, I was now telling a story, not just talking about telling stories.

This was my first time speaking at a conference. I was terrified. I've spoken publicly plenty of times, at company functions, at church. I've acted in plays and skits in front of large groups. I've played guitar and sung in front of relatively large crowds a couple times at least. Nonetheless, I was terrified. I barely slept the night before, and my stomach was upset the whole day of my talk. I barely ate.

And to put a little bow on it, my two talks—my personal talk and my joint presentation with Jesse—were back-to-back. Well, at least I'd be done afterward!

Oh, and they put me in the big conference hall—the same one they were using for the keynote presentations.

I'm told it went well. Watching the video, I'm pretty happy with what came out. It's not perfect, by any means, but I do think it's about the best I can do right now.

If you're reading this and considering talking at a conference, here's what I wish I'd known, or thought about:

Have something to say. Figure out what someone attending your talk needs to know, or what you most want them to know, and figure out whether it really matters. If not, start over. While you're at it, have something unique to say. If the conference attendee could get your content somewhere else, why would they have paid likely thousands of dollars in conference admission and travel expenses to hear it? If your content is unique in some way, start over.

Learn how to use a microphone, and be aware of it. Don't be shy. Make it easy for your audience to hear you. Don't blow your nose, scratch your beard, etc. into the mic. If you know you have a cold, work out with your sound guy how you're going to mute the mic when you need to blow your nose, use your hankerchief, etc.

Don't compare yourself to other speakers. This should be an idea meritocracy, if there ever was one.

Do entertain. Don't be boring. You don't have to tap-dance, but it doesn't hurt to relax a bit, share something personal, crack a joke (but don't force it) or generally demonstrate that you don't take yourself too seriously.

Your slides matter. You may not be a designer. You may fancy yourself a designer. Either way, get some help. Ugly, confusing slides are going to distract your audience. NO CLIP ART. NO CHEESY STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY.

Don't look at your own slides. Definitely don't read them. Look at your audience. Presenter's notes are okay, but don't read them. Practice your talk enough that you pretty much have the outline memorized. Put the outline in your presenter's notes. Use them to help you remember where you are, maybe even specific data points (any actual hard numbers you need to get exactly right, quotations, etc.), but do not read them out loud.

Keep your slides simple. You don't need transitions, builds, and all that stuff. Once you're good at using slides without that stuff, you'll have a better idea of when to use them. Don't use sound or video unless you absolutely need them. The audience wants to hear you, not something canned that they could have heard without spending all that money to get here.

Bring some water. If you're nervous, it can save your life.

Consider the possibility that people are going to ask questions afterward, either while you're still on-stage or otherwise. If you can't answer a few questions well, you can squander whatever credibility you built up during your talk. You can end up discrediting yourself and your talk.

Give yourself a break. It's harder these days. With Twitter and such, you can't fail in private anymore, but neither can anyone else. Your first talk might suck. That might be enough for you to figure out this isn't your deal. It might be motivation to practice. Either way, it won't end your life or career. And, you might not suck! You definitely might not suck as much as you think you did!

For reference, you can watch my talk, "Shakespeare in Dev," here.

[thomasqbrady]

Øredev 2013

A much longer post is due, and will come soon, but, hopefully suffice it to say for now that it's been an incredible honor and pleasure to have been invited to participate in Øredev 2013. I did two talks, one technical talk on Ember JS, which I think may be a little too technical to share here but was a sneak peek at the book Jesse Cravens and I are releasing soon with O'Reilly, and one personal talk on the power of story to unite designers and developers, which you can watch below. Thank you (Tack!) Øredev. Thank you Linda, my wife, for making this possible, for picking up all my slack all those nights while I worked on these talks, for being a single parent for a week so I could be in Sweden. For being excited for me, so selflessly, when it meant so much cost to you .

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[sexpigeon]

Bert and Ernie.

[thomasqbrady]

!!!

[derekeads]

The Spring Standards & The Silver Lake Chorus by Derek Eads

[thomasqbrady]

My, oh, MY, this is gorgeous!

[thomasqbrady]

I've been busy...

There's been a lot going on at home, at work and in my third place. I'm excited to finally get a chance, and in some cases the clearance, to talk about some of what I've been up to.

Wearables

A couple months ago I got really hot and bothered about wearable tech. I saw projects like the Pebble Watch and even got a Jawbone UP, but I didn't see the total package in any of these options. I wanted a watch that would vibrate to alert me that I was getting call or text message, and maybe show me caller ID information about the call. At the time, there wasn't a device for sale that I could find that did all—or in some cases just—those things.

So I decided to build my own.

I got an Arduino Fio, a replacement iPod battery(they didn't carry iPod mini replacement batteries at the time, but that looks like a better option), and a BlueGiga WT32-based bluetooth module from an off-brand, much more affordable source and a real time clock module, which I had no idea I'd need at the start of the project. That last bit required different voltage than I was using everywhere else (needed 5V, but all I had was 3.3V), so my rigged setup required a double-A battery, too, for a good-enough boost to 4.8-ishV (couldn't seem to find a voltage booster that would be small enough/cheap enough). I intended to fashion a bezel with this hand-moldable plastic from Inventables.

The best-laid plans...

Have nothing to do with this story. I spent hours. Hours. HOURS on this project. I don't regret it in the least. Every step was new information. I'd tinkered with Arduinos a bit, but I hadn't encountered one, yet, that required special hardware just to be able to connect to a computer to be programmed (it's called an FTDI adapter—something that can connect to your computer via USB and speak computer languages on one end, and connect via serial connection on the other end, and speak in micro-controller languages. They're built into the flagship Arduinos (Uno, Leonardo, etc.).

Oh, and a .96" OLED screen. It felt unreal the first time I got that thing going. Hours of soldering, writing code, watching video tutorials (available at that link for the screen itself) and testing, and it was just strange to see something I'd made rendered on that tiny little OLED screen. I've been writing software for most of my life, and every new platform is a bit of a thrill. This, for some strange reason, was one of the bigger thrills. I think it's because it felt like a realm in to which I shouldn't be able to reach—like I was manufacturing my own consumer electronics. This less-than-$100 pile of Radio Shack-available parts didn't exist in this form 10 years ago. This was a new frontier.

In the end I learned that it's not as easy as pulling a bunch of Radio Shack parts off the shelf and beating them up with your soldering iron. The package never got small enough that I would actually be willing to wear it. But it did work, which was a pretty satisfying end to what could have been a downer of a project. Here's the working code at Github. With compatible hardware, that'll get you a 5-minute-increments clock (if memory serves), and, when paired with a bluetooth phone, a vibrating alert when an incoming call is received, as well as caller ID info.

Sadly, I fried the Fio when trying to clean up my late-night soldering job, and I only just realized I never got photos or video of the working rig. : (

Research on Rails

After a few weeks of not having a side project, I got the bug to a) learn Ruby on Rails and b) build a research tool I'd been kicking around for a while. When you design products for clients, they get pretty picky about where you keep your notes. It's become a tradition at frog to build internal-use-only clones of services like Dropbox, Evernote and the like, because, well, we're jealous. We can't store our client's data outside our firewall, so we have to build our own toys.

For everything but client work, you can pry Evernote from my cold, dead hands, so I set out to build something similar for client work. I've long been interested in collaborative workspaces, so I also took more than a couple cues from Pinterest. I call it Catcher. It's my first Ruby on Rails app, and it's currently in use by a couple dozen frogs. I couldn't be happier. Here's a demo:

One feature not shown there is the ability to email items to an internal-only email address, which get scraped and added to your list, including attached or embedded images, URLS and keword tags that were in the subject line. I was trying to make sure that this was a tool that could server alongside the ways that we frogs currently solve this problem, one of which is by sending emails. Of course, this is better than those emails, because in six months when you go looking for that thing you know you got from somebody on some project about something kinda like… Well, good luck searching your inbox. The email you're looking for probably has a ssubject line that reads something like, "Exactly like this:" and the body of the email is just an image or a URL. If you added it to Catcher, which you could do just by forwarding the email, you might have taken a moment to add some keyword tags. Even if you didn't do that—shame on you—you stand a better chance picking out the image or a big block quote on the infinitely scrolling "Home Plate."

At least that's the idea.

You might recognize a bit of Pinterest in there, too. At frog, and other agencies where I've worked, it's another common practice to have big pegboards up around team areas, where you can print and pin project-related artifacts. These are anything from wireframes to Gantt charts, but most of the time they're inspiration bits—mood-boards, funny pictures, mockups and just plain pretty pictures. I wanted that kind of content to have a home in Catcher, too. A forthcoming feature will add a filter that will let you see just "inspiration" items, or just "bookmarks," etc.

I spent hours on this project, too, enjoying every minute. The vast majority of them were outside work hours. Note to employers: I ended up building something very similar to this for a client in record time because I had just done it for this side project. And screen captures of the tool have ended up in some pitch decks, too. Free time, in the hands of the right people, can be a very powerful thing.

I'll spend a lot more, hours on this, too. Looks like someone in China just started using it, even though I've tried to keep it under wraps while it's in "beta."

SxSW 2013

frog Austin has been an integral part of SxSW for over a decade now, in that we have thrown the kickoff party for all but a couple years of the existence of the conference. Each year got a little crazier. Apparently the party was broken up by the fire department one year.

It's a chance for a bunch of frogs to get together in a warehouse with power tools, buckets of electronics parts, loud music and the goal of making crazy-cool attractions for a party full of thousands of geeks.

Sadly, I got tricked into doing something for the party that didn't involve any of that. I ended up working a good number of hours alone at coffee shops and at my dining room table, at all hours of the night. It sure paid off, though. The attraction I got to work on was an experiment in crowdsourced DJing. We teamed up(again) with TouchTunes(again—we partnered with them to design their latest hardware and software), makers of touch-powered digital jukeboxes found in thousands of bars and restaurants. They brought 20 of their jukeboxes (an intimidating sight by daylight, and the closest thing I've experienced to being a moth near a fluorescent light at night) and added the event space as a venue in their smartphone app. This made it possible for any or all 6,000-ish party-goers we had that night to cast a vote for what would be played by walking up to the Tron-tastic jukeboxes or whipping out their smartphones. And they did. We had nearly 10,000 votes, playing over forty songs chosen by the crowd all night.

I got to build a very-large-screen experience that visualized all this activity real-time. A projected screen near the jukeboxes showed, on rotation, something akin to a slide presentation wherein the slide were alive with data. I got to do a lot of the design of the experience, as well, at the information architecture/wireframe stage. Thankfully I got to work with a visual designer to bring those to vivid, neon life—thanks, Gloria! I'm no data-viz-whiz, but I think it turned out all right. I tried to make sure to balance the exposure the votes got. If we only showed you which songs were in the top 5, for instance, those songs would be assured their top 5 spot. If you're standing there and you look up at that big screen and see a song title, you're likely to say, "Oh, I love that song!" and vote for it. So I tried to expose the underdogs. There was a screen that only showed songs that had recently (within the last 30 seconds) received their first vote. Another show every song that had received any votes at all as various sized squares—the more votes the bigger. At regular intervals a random song from that collection was chosen and spotlighted, showing you the artist's name and the song's title.

Lots of people, myself included, gamed the system. You could, if you so chose, stand at the jukebox and choose the same song again and again, if you didn't mind looking a little, obsessed. Early in the evening, this was fairly easy to do. Into the third hour, you'd have to vote hundreds of times this way to break the top 10. I single-handedly chose the second song of the night. I was determined to hear some Tom Waits, and we did. I was kind and played "Jockey Full of Bourbon" and not "Earth Died Screaming" or "Pony."

There was also a slide that showed a real-time 10-band EQ graph of the sound of the event. A mic was connected to the server running the event, which captured not only the music, but crowd noise.

Here's a video from our marketing department covering the event, with a section—starting at 2:06 on the crowdsourced DJ attraction, and some shots of the part I worked on starting at 2:22:

The Aftermath... math

I spent a lot of time building and testing and testing and rebuilding and testing and... You get the idea. The app was pulling voting data from Heroku, synchronizing that data with a local SQLite database, and then going through the same hoops to get song metadata. We had a test server and a production server. For some reason, every time we tested with the production server everything crapped out. Up to just a couple hours before the event. I was sitting in the rain at the outdoor venue re-writing whole chunks of the application. In the end, it worked. Perfectly. I started the app, and only watched—never had to touch—the admin console I'd built for it, except to call up the "Bar's closing/Last call" slide.

I was as tired as I've been in a long time that day after the event, having been up very late for a couple weeks working on this code, up early the day of the event rebuilding signage girders and setting up PA equipment, and up late again that night tearing things down. But I was sitting there the next afternoon with a database full of 10,000 votes cast by thousands of people, and 250,000 pixels worth of graphed waveforms recorded at the party. I had to see what was in there. I wanted everyone to see what was in there. So I set out to learn some more HTML5 and some d3, and the next thing I knew I had another side project. A couple weeks later, with some much-needed design help from fellow frogs Michael "Gondola" McDaniel and Mike Herdzina, this popped out:

The coolest/craziest/scariest part is that this thing has been published. First by Core 77, in part three of their coverage of the crowdsourced DJ thing from SxSW itself (crazy just doubled, Inception-style), and soon, as I understand it, on Design Mind.

Until very recently, it had been about five or six years since the last time I had actually shipped an HTML application, one where cross-browser use actually had to be supported. The web has change so much, and so little in that time. There are myriad little pains in developing for the web, but the ubiquity of software that can make use of your work is intoxicating. And making use of a good web browser to lay out text or deliver content to a screen-reader is like riding downhill on a bicycle. Hardware-agnosticism in the form of Java and similar technologies is, to me, a myth. They try to tell you, "We can make it easy to write your software once, and run it anywhere." Web development sounds, on first blush, like it's making the same promise. The difference, though, is that no one ever said it would be easy. You'll be able to run your software in lots of places, but you're still on the line to support all the thousands of little differences between hardware, software and user needs your software will find itself surrounded by. To me that's a lot more realistic. Honest.

[thomasqbrady]

Bruce Tognazzini nails Apple's approach to a smart watch

Strumming my pain with his fingers...

Tognazzini (known better as "Tog", as in the "Tog on" series of books he wrote about interaction design before most people knew that was a thing), former interaction designer at Apple, takes a very educated guess at what Apple would do with a smart watch. He puts an eloquent voice to all the things I find frustrating about every current design on the market, and outlines how Apple could/would/might/will? dierupt this market. Don't miss.

[thomasqbrady]

Music Video shot in an MRI Scanner

[thomasqbrady]

Karma - the "just works" pay-as-you-go mobile hotspot

My mom has one of those Clear hotspots. You know the one. It comes with any of a number of logos on it. Looks like a tiny Apple TV with three green lights on the front—if you're very lucky. It's usually on a table in front of someone who's doing the Jerry Seinfeld posture—the one that says "Who's the genius who…"—and cursing profusely.

Enter Karma. I heard about them when someone—sadly, I don't remember who—tweeted about having received there's around Christmas. I did a bunch of reading, and, despite being incredibly wary of the hardware, more on that in a second, I placed an order.

The Karma is the very same hardware, by the looks of it, as that nefarious Clear Spot, though in Storm Trooper white to the Clear/Sprint/et al's Darth Vader black. The big—no huge—difference is the software. You don't do any configuring with the Karma. With the spot, or similar, there are lots of hoops to jump through, typically, to secure the modem—setting your own encryptiong method, password, etc. With the Karma, you simply login with your Facebook credentials. As much as I dislike Facebook, this makes for a superbly easy, works-right-out-of-the-box experience. They're so sure of it, and so proud, that this is the instruction card that comes in the box:

That's pretty much it. There's more on the back, but with just that, you'll suddenly see a WiFi hotspot in range called, "Thomas's Karma," if your Facebook account is for a person whose first name is Thomas. It's already secured. Much like a coffee shop WiFi setup, you are greeted by a web page when you attempt to connect to the Karma, where you are asked to log in via Facebook.

This is all just icing, though. Even if the zero-configuration experience weren't a part of this offering, I would have likely ordered the Karma anyway because of the business model/pricing structure. Your Karma serves up pay-as-you-go data. Fifteen dollars gets you a gigabyte of data. No expiration dates. Dead simple, and fairly priced.

If you're paying attention, you may be asking yourself, "Wait a minute… what happend if some freeloader with a Facebook account logs in to the modem?" That's another interesting thing about their pricing/model. If this happens, that person is invited to use or create their own account with Karma, and purchase their own data at $15/GB. They're using your infrastructure to get there, but they're not using your data plan. And for the effort of lugging around and charging the modem you're both connected by, you get 100 MB added to your account when they connect.

So far the Karma has performed beautifully. I get great speeds (usually around 8 Mb/second), the battery lasts longer than I've ever needed so far, and I'm quite happy with the pricing.

[thomasqbrady]

Music is math is amazing is confusing is language

R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion," shifted to a major, rather than minor key. It's an impressive edit, a very spooky sound to someone who knows the song, and testimony to the power of the minor key. I would have hated this song, had it been released this way.

Via kung fu grippe.