Ged Carroll

Category: technology | 技術 | 기술 | テクノロジー

It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.

One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.

My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.

I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.

My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.

Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.

That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.

  • Secure empty trash + more news

    How to replace El Capitan’s missing Secure Empty Trash | Macworld – SSD as security risks. This is because sold state drives can only be read and written to a limited amount of times which poses problems when you want to do three or more overwrites on a regular basis as part of the secure empty trash process. The irony being that hard disks despite their many faults are more secure. More on SSDs here.

    Fake Everything 2019 Update – 50 odd examples of how the online advertising marketplace is thoroughly corrupted. This is well worth a good read if you have anything to do with digital marketing. This should bring up questions around efficiency and effectiveness. Unfortunately this seems to have been supplanted by the cult of disruption above everything else.

    Internet advertising to grow at slowest rate since 2001 dotcom bust | Media | The Guardian – deceptive visuals, but interesting analysis. We’re now in the tyranny of high numbers. The sheer size of numbers required to drive percentage increases mean that growth had to slow. You also have concerns about the data supporting online advertising media planning and measurement due to ad fraud (see the Fake Everything 2019 update above this as a good primer). In addition, there is now data available that underlines concerns about having a more balanced media mix in play. More on online advertising here.

    AR/VR early stage valuations soften, leading to investment and acquisition opportunities | VentureBeat – China investing more in VR and AR than the US. These investments seem to be focused exclusively on domestic market requirements.

    Hackers breach FSB contractor, expose Tor deanonymization project and more | ZDNet – interesting that Tor networks have been breached. Tor was developed by US defence department grants to provide secure internet communications for people living under repressive regimes.

  • New MacBook Pro – some thoughts

    My old MacBook Pro, which had seen me through a lot of work had been starting to show its age, so I changed it out for a new model. The process has been challenging at times so I thought that I would write about the good, the bad and the weird parts of this experience.

    My new machine has taken a size bump to 15.4 inches. The largest MacBook I’ve had in the best part of ten years. The reason for the size bump was to try and retain a working days worth of battery life. From a size perspective the 13 inch machine suits me better but battery performance seems to be in retreat.

    Preparing the machine

    I had the opportunity to make a controlled move to the new machine, so I cleaned a lot of the data from the old computer. Trying to deal with as many duplicate files as possible.

    Once this process was done I used Apple’s migration tool. This moves across data effortlessly. I’ve done this a number of times since running MacOS X back in 2002. This had to be done over wi-fi as connecting the two machines via an ethernet cable would be problematic.

    Preparing the hardware

    I am a big fan of Incase’s hard shell that clips on to your laptop. It protects it from coffee smeared tables and the odd light prang. This is then covered in stickers like it has been bombed by a crack team of Japanese school children.

    Untitled

    So why do I have a sticker covered laptop? A good while ago I had a client at a major telecoms sector company try and swipe my laptop in front of my eyes.

    “Oh, I thought it was mine” they said whilst ignoring the Lenovo peeking out of their laptop bag.

    Opening the shell up I fit a TechPrivacy web cam privacy cover. They look very thin and are fragile during the fitting process, but once on your laptop work perfectly and don’t impede closing the laptop up fully.

    I use a torch to work out where the camera is and run FaceTime to check that I am not impeding the camera or the camera power light.

    These new Macs are known for their keyboards. They feel unresponsive to a touch typist like me and seem to be prone to the ingress of any foreign matter. Keyboards are horrible grotty things swimming in dead skin, hair folicles and food crumbs. I can’t do much to make the keyboard feel better, but I have fitted a MOSISO Keyboard Cover to provide a bit of protection.

    Finally, I topped this off with an Amazon Basics neoprene laptop sleeve. MacBook Pros are a hassle to repair, even with AppleCare+, the sleeve is a small investment.

    Powering up

    I have series of chargers including an in-car charger and airplane seat charger designed to work with American market airplanes that I have accumulated since my first Intel MacBook Pro back in 2006. Some of the cables have a silicon holder and MagSafe 2 connector attached.

    I have breathed a sigh of relief many times when my power cable has been snagged and not taken the laptop tumbling on to the floor with it. All of which are now useless given Apple’s move to USB-C. Unfortunately USB-C is not snag proof like the earlier MagSafe power connectors. Thankfully, I can still use the extension cables that I have. Apple doesn’t include them in the box with the laptop any more.

    Some third party designers have trialled products that mix the best of USB C with a MagSafe like connection. Apple’s current solution feels like a petty and backwards step.

    Making a connection

    I mentioned early on that I couldn’t do an ethernet-to-ethernet connection for the data migration to my new laptop. The problem is that the new MacBook Pro only has five connection points. Four of which are USB C and the fifth is a 3.5mm headphone socket.

    You need dongles for everything:

    SD Card reader – you need a dongle for that. Apple has one that it will sell you.

    USB connection, for when you want to connect your iPhone to your MacBook Pro…

    HDMI connector – Choetech’s product seems to be well made

    VGA connector – Amazon Basics have connector that’s relatively good value and seems to be as well made as it’s Apple cousin

    Thunderbolt 2 to USB C. Connecting to Thunderbolt 2 devices is a whole new world of pain. Apple’s own adaptor works inconsistently. Given that my home set up runs on two hubs connected to two Apple cinema displays all over Thunderbolt 2, this was critical for me to have work. In the end I found that StarTech’s adaptors whilst ugly, work a treat.

    This means that as a mobile worker going in and out of agency spaces like I’ve been doing, you need a few hundred pounds worth of add-on dongles and power cords to get anything done. My laptop starts to look like a white legged arthritic spider rather than the slick working machine I previously enjoyed.

    For mobile working, I’ve just started trying out a Pioneer Multiport adaptor that does VGA, ethernet, a single ethernet port and HDMI. It’s not particularly elegant but is also pretty cheap.

    A migration that hits the pocket and your time

    Migrating to the new MacBook Pro machine has been a major investment in peripheral hardware and a time suck in order to tune the set up to work properly. There has been much to say about good design.

    Good design (with a huge debt to Dieter Rams):

    • Is innovative (but doesn’t idolise innovation)
    • Makes a product useful (out of the box)
    • Is aesthetic (balance, good tastes and proportions)
    • Makes a product understandable (it just works)
    • Is unobtrusive (doesn’t call attention to itself in operation)
    • Is honest
    • Is long-lasting (consumption is an experience of layers with new and old products in a user journey)
    • Is thorough down to the last detail (and delights the user with that level of thought)
    • Is environmentally friendly (not wasteful, designed for the long haul, user serviceable)
    • Involves as little design as possible (Economy of experience, for instance not having a laptop’s ports hidden behind doors. it just is. This is as much about the metaphysics of quality intrinsic in the product as anything else)
    • Is knowing when to say no (or yes) – not having an FM radio on the iPhone or iPod. But having ports people would actually use on the new MacBook Pro
    • Is function first, form second (a build on making a product useful first, then aesthetically pleasing)

    The MacBook Pro fails on many of these attributes.

  • Chip implants + more stuff

    Swedish people are getting chip implants to replace cash | NY Post – is it just me who thinks that this might not be the smartest thing to do? Chip implants are the stuff of conspiracies. And the mind boggles what kind of new crimes that this might inspire.

    Israeli group’s spyware ‘offers keys to Big Tech’s cloud’ | Financial Times – affects Facebook, Amazon, Apple and more. Guessing that major state actors can also do this already. Private companies like NSO basically democratises this for countries that don’t have this capability inhouse, including some of them that authoritarian in nature

    Individual Beyond the Personal | Ogilvy Consulting – Global Strategy and Innovation – interesting take on AR/VR level immersion

    Salesforce talk about a vision that’s way beyond narrow machine learning skills to something that looks much more like general purpose AI. We are told by experts that general purpose AI is still decades away. Consequently I can’t work out if this is long term concepting or snake oil….

    ‘Cordless’ Dyson fan advert falls foul of watchdog – BBC News – really interesting judgement. I think the ASA is right, but there are implications for future demonstration visuals of products

    Black Pastors Group Petition Nike to Drop Colin Kaepernick – Footwear News – ok this is going to get interesting. More on Nike here.

    Juul CEO: “I’m Sorry” for Teen Vaping Epidemic – “First of all, I’d tell them that I’m sorry that their child’s using the product,” Burns told CNBC during an interview for an upcoming documentary on the rise of vaping in the U.S. “It’s not intended for them. I hope there was nothing that we did that made it appealing to them. As a parent of a 16-year-old, I’m sorry for them, and I have empathy for them, in terms of what the challenges they’re going through.” – Good design attracts users of all ages….

  • The Jony Ive post

    Looking back on the career of Jony Ive, its hard to believe where the company came from. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple he picked through much of Apple and didn’t like what he saw. He did see something in Jonathan Ive and the small cadre of product designers left at Apple.

    Meine neue Bettlektüre. Jony Ive.

    Ive’s moving on from Apple some 27 years after he joined is a long innings. During that time Apple went from having a near death experience as a computer maker to selling luxury goods.

    Whilst Ive is one of the world’s best known product designers; he has had his fair share of failed products.

    • The Apple Cube
    • The Newton MessagePad 110

    I consider Ive’s body fo work as head of design at Apple to break down into three periods:

    The Candy Age

    ‘The Candy Age’ was about putting fun back into computers like the iMac. It was a break from Apple’s previous pseudo corporate product design such as the platinum or ‘Snow White’ design language. Around this time you had big organic forms that CAD and tough polycarbonate plastics made possible. From Silicon Graphics Octane and O2 workstations to retro styled Smeg fridges; fun was in.

    The Jony Ive led design team took the transparent prototypes that were usually used to see how products go together and look for things like pinched cables into production. This made a virtue of the innards.

    This provided clear differentiation between Apple and beige box PCs whilst still providing out of the box functionality of an internet appliance. It was this mix of timing and plug-and-play functionality that drove iMac and iBook sales as much as product design.

    This was when Apple started to move from being a ‘weird’ platform to a cool platform.

    Speaking of cool, Jobs pushed both the engineering and design team to keep the amount of cool fans in the devices to a minimum to reduce device noise.

    Pseudo Bauhaus

    Apple started to go from coloured translucent polycarbonate to white polycarbonate and metal. You see this in the second iteration of the iBook which went from looking like a funky toilet seat to a a clean white laptop design. The last generation PowerBooks and early MacBooks in aluminium alloys where a premium version. It gave use the iconic iPod earphones and the early iPod classic designs.

    There was a move to recto-linear shapes and details that were a nod to Dieter Rams work at Braun. During this time Ive was interviewed for the documentary Objectified and specifically stated that their products looked to embrace Rams’ ten rules of good design.

    Size Zero

    Apple was obsessed with size. There is an apocryphal story about Steve Jobs dropping a prototype iPod into a fish tank. He noticed that air bubbles came out of the case. Jobs jumped on this as proof that there was wasted internal space. What this story missed is the emphasis Jobs put on thermal performance.

    Motorola came out with two products in 2004 and 2005. One was the PEBL. The phone was rounded and smooth like a pebble – a tactile pleasure. The second was the RAZR, a phone that was broad and really thin for a feature phone. The RAZR was the more successful.

    We know that Jobs used the RAZR, he pulled his phone out on stage. You can see the influence of the RAZR in slim devices like the iPhone, the MacBook Air and the iPad.

    If Apple couldn’t make it thin, they made it small. That’s the reason why Apple went with the ‘waste paper bin’ Mac Book Pro. Being circular also cut interconnect distances in theory.

    The problem with size zero is that Apple designed itself into a corner:

    • Thermal management became an issue. As I write this my MacBook Pro is blowing up a hurricane. Apple’s Mac Pro line had to be redesigned from the ground up because the ‘waste paper basket’ design couldn’t handle the heat dissipation required for major machines
    • Minimalism to the point of commodisation. Because Ive reduced the phone down to resembling a thick sheet of class, it meant that differentiation through industrial design didn’t matter. Hence why its really hard to tell one phone from another
    • Environmental impact and repairability. Apple has to use special robots to disassemble iPhones for recycling. Apple AirPods are unrepairable and professional grade laptops can’t be upgraded post-purchase. On the MacBook Pro you have ultra slim keyboard keys that are intolerant of use

    Jony Ive leaves a mixed legacy behind at Apple. His departure gives the design team an opportunity to push the reset button and come up with a new design language for products moving forwards.

  • Flickr best social network experience + more

    Flickr best social network experience going / Boing Boing – I believe that flickr best social network experience at present, but I am not blind to the communities flaws

    An Oral History of Oakleys, the Most Badass Sunglasses of the 1990s | MEL Magazine – or how Luxottica made a great brand merely good. More related content here.

    The Ad Contrarian: The Stupidity Of Ignoring Older People | Ad Contrarian – interesting, it used to be that half the lifetime spend was done before the age of 35. Given that most marketing is short term programmes marketing to older people as well makes sense

    China Counterfeiters’ Hot Product in 2019? Peppa Pig Couture | Jing Daily – interesting China’s fake clothing people have been cranking out snide Peppa Pig wear; including dreaming up Burberry, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Off-White and Givenchy collaborations that haven’t happened! It’s wonderful and subversive at the same time

    They welcomed a robot into their family, now they’re mourning its death – The Verge – Williams understands that companies have bottom lines and that gadgets come and go, but Jibo was also designed to appeal to children, and those kids are now learning what it means to own a robot and have no control over its fate – pretty dark stuff. It sounds like the product succeeded with customers but was too pricey for what was required – A couple of things here; it wasn’t that long ago that we thought Japanese people were odd for having Shinto funeral ceremonies for their dead Aibos. Now we see similar behaviour playing out for Jibo. Secondly, unlike the first Aibo, Jibo is essentially a cloud personality, which begs the question when’s the move towards device based AI etc coming back as seeing your kids cry is too much?

    Dolce & Gabbana’s Expanded Sizing “Proves They’re Really about Selling Clothing,” Not Just Leveraging it — The Fashion Law – Dolce & Gabbana has announced that it will increase its sizing to include garments that will range up to size 54 in Italy, the approximate equivalent of a stateside size 18? You bet it is. The move by the Milan-based brand to extend its sizing – which went into force with its currently available pre-fall collection – “makes it one of the most inclusive designer brands for women,” according to The Independent’s Olivia Petter, a far cry from most high fashion brands, which Fashionista’s deputy editor Tyler McCall says “stop much closer to a size 10 [or] below that even.” – I think its a smart move given their problems in China

    The crisis in creative effectiveness | WARC – There has been a serious declining trend in the effectiveness of creatively awarded campaigns over the last ten years. The most recent IPA/WARC Rankings data, explored in the new Crisis of Creative Effectiveness report, confirms this continuing decline; creatively awarded campaigns are now less effective than they have ever been in the entire 24-year run of data and are now no more effective than non-awarded campaigns. We have arrived in an era where award-winning creativity typically brings little or no effectiveness advantage.

    Top 1000 Brands | Intelligence | Campaign Asia – for China

    Study Shows Big Rise in Teen Vaping This Year – The New York Times and Juul faces House investigation over teen e-cigarette use – this is going to get regulated sooner rather than later and the whole Philip Morris International ‘dialogue’ campaign is going to leave some creative agencies holding the reputation equivalent of a live hand grenade