Category: driving seat | 產品試用 | 시험 비행 | 製品トライアル

The driving seat in English has two definitions:

The seat from which a vehicle is operated.
A position of power, dominance, control, or superiority. The second naturally is derived from the first as a metaphor

I used driving seat as a metaphor about being in control, to discuss what a product is like to use. I looked at a range of products:

Skype back in 2004, before it became kludgey with a poorly designed interface under Microsoft ownership
Veoh – a video platform that was a native client and on the web that went head-to-head with YouTube. The better technology lost out
Yojimbo – a great information organisation software app by Bare Bones Software
Flip Video Camera – back before cameraphones were ubquitous flip provided an easy way to record and upload video to the web. It encouraged a lot of people to record vox pop video interviews for the nascent YouTube platform
The Bing search engine in a direct comparison to Ask.com
Sina Weibo
A retrospective on the Palm Vx PDA that was my dot.com era ride or die gadget
Early Casio G-Shock and Apple Watch smartwatches
Hemingway writing software
Casio G-Shock Frogman
A retrospective review of the Nokia n950
The Missing Manual series by David Pogue
Apple iPhone 12 Max

I have tried to avoid superlatives and give the perceptions of having lived with the products rather than having briefly tested them. Having run review programmes for Huawei and Palm, I understand how short hands-on sessions can be deceptive. Usually this isn’t by design, but due to supply issues; however it is worth bearing in mind when you read the latest review by professional pundits.

The helmsman + more things

Sailing the Seas Depends on The Helmsman

Sailing The Seas Depends On The Helmsman – There has been a minor drama playing out amongst westerners who analyse China. A theatre group put on a performance in the symbolic heart of the Chinese Communist Party. Sailing The Seas Depends On The Helmsman – is a Cultural Revolution era song which eulogises Mao Zedong’s leadership.

The Helmsman or Great Helmsman was one of the many labels Mao picked up as leader of China. This series of concerts were seen as a celebration of the Cultural Revolution and elevated President Xi to a similar ‘cult of personality’ within China. Some considered it to be a subtle way to sabotage Mr Xi. Either way it took pull to allow the group to perform in the Great Hall of the People. The scale of the presentation was spectacular and it’s quite a catchy tune – as you can see in the video created by the South China Morning Post.

Morgan special projects

I am not the fan of car designs that I was as a child and have never been a fan of Morgans. But there is a lot to admire in Morgan Motor’s Special Project team. The video outlines the process they went through in building a bespoke car for a customer. Ask pretty much any other car manufacturer to do this and the money would literally be astronomical.

It is ironic in a day of 3D printing and CNC machines that they use old school techniques that my Dad would have learned as an apprentice to create a special one-off car. There is also an interesting mix of materials in the design and the marine plywood-based seats caught my eye. The designer gave careful thought to how the car would age.

Objective See

Objective-See – handy ransomware blocker for OSX (macOS), ideal for these troubled times when 2/3rds of UK business have come under some form of a hack.

Everyday objects

A blogger who goes by the name of ‘The Electronic Mercenary’ has set up a great YouTube channel where they x-ray everyday objects or components for your enjoyment.

Check it out.

I don’t often have much time for Samsung, their product advertising usually lacks subtlety and creative chops – you are not charmed by their marketing. Instead you are bludgeoned into submission with a media plan that has more in common with a Katyusha rocket system than persuasion. Occasionally they do some stunning emotive corporate marketing, this is the latest example. Separated Korean families unite in heartfelt Samsung spot | Marketing Interactive

May 13, 2016
Using terminal.app in macOS

Terminal.app is a way of getting to the Unix underpinnings of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system. It is generally kept out of the way because an uneducated user could do a lot of damage. I have put together eight of my favourite life hacks using Terminal here. Your mileage will vary. Over time Apple has stopped supporting some commands and introduced others grep used to come in handy for finding and removing duplicate files. A new command called ditto makes it really easy to make copies of folders.

Finger was originally used on Unix systems as a kind of directory system. You could see a person’s office address, their telephone number and the last time that they had logged on to mail (what we’d call email now). That last bit of data gave you an idea of if they were available online at the moment.

If there is one terminal.app function everyone should know, it would be how to ping as a basic way to check their net connection. Just be sure to switch your pings off once you know!

This is very useful if you are trying to stop your neighbour piggybacking off your Wi-Fi connection.

Usually I’d be going to a site like whois.com to get this information. But in terminal.app you get the most comprehensive data and don’t have to put up with adverts.

I have put together each of these as a presentation as well. More on productivity and MacOS here. It is worthwhile also checking out ‘Learn Enough Unix for Your Resume‘ on Wired. Pamela Statz’ article originally featured on Wired’s ‘hotwired.com’ site during the dot.com boom in 1997. It was then moved on to their now redundant Web Monkey brand and now resides on Wired. Yet like Unix the article still remains useful :-). Also check out Jeffrey Paul’s Stupid Unix Tricks here, the Unix Toolbox is also good, but think carefully about what you’re doing before you do it. Interesting background reading on BSD (a real Unix) versus Linux (a Unix-like system). It also worthwhile checking out David Pogue’s books on macOS and O’Reilly Publishing’s books on Unix.

150326 terminal lifehacks from Ged Carroll

March 27, 2016
Hemingway + process
I use a range of tools including Hemingway as part of my content creation process. This came out when I had a meeting with some junior marketing agency staff last week. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss content strategy across different clients. In the end an good part of the conversation went into process and content creation.

Given that conversation I thought it might be fruitful to flag up some of the technologies that I use.

Hemingway

I use Hemingway ( a web application and a native OSX application) to write. Hemingway has two writing modes:

Editing mode looks at your copy as you create it:
- It looks at readability providing a reading age score. (Grade six is equates to 11-12 years old). The lower the reading age, the clearer the writing is. It has also aids in SEO
- It examines sentence structure, the harder a sentence is to read, the more ambiguous it may be.
- Hemingway suggests simpler alternatives to phases
- It looks at adverbs and use of the passive voice
Hemingway is like having a sub-editor sitting on your shoulder at the point of creation.

Writing mode clears the real-time editing functions to the right of the screen. It allows me to get content down as a stream of consciousness. It allows me to get ideas down before I lose the train of thought.

You can then switch to editing mode to go back and clean up your copy once you have it down.

The OSX version allows you to save documents down as a HTML file, from which you can cut and paste into a destination. It just works whether its a presentation, document, WordPress or social platforms.

Pinboard

Pinboard is a social bookmarking service that now costs $11/year. It allows me to store links and notes about websites that I find of interest.

Pinboard is a web service so my bookmarks go where I can get a web connection.

I use a bookmarklet that sits in the chrome of my browser. Every time I come across something that might be of interest, I click on the link and complete a simple form.
- URL – I only change the link if it is a temporary link such as ‘feedproxy.google.com’. I expand the link or change it to any permalink that is on the page
- Title – I edit this as necessary to reflect the article title and the website name
- Description – this is a quick explanation of why I thought the page was significant. It might be an article quote or top statistics mentioned
- Tags – categories or labels that I assign to an article which allows me to find it based on a relevance. Tags are used by other applications as well
I use Pinner for iOS on my iPhone. It integrates into the system level sharing functionality. I can create bookmarks on the move as well as at my desk.

Terminal

The Terminal app in OSX allows direct access to the power of the operating system. It is also unforgiving. Getting a command wrong can have serious consequences.

There are a few things that I can do faster in terminal than via other methods. From checking differences in documents, to batch processing file archiving. To get you started here are two examples that you can try: to see if a website is up to getting a weather forecast.

I have a copy of UNIX in a Nutshell from O’Reilly Media on my bookshelf. I use this as a back-up when I can’t remember the proper syntax or a command. I can also recommend Learning Unix for OS X: Going Deep With the Terminal and Shell also from O’Reilly Media.

IFTTT

At the beginning of 2007 Yahoo! launched an experimental product called Yahoo! Pipes. It was flakey, it was unreliable but also revolutionary. Pipes was an easy way to stitch together services without programming expertise. After years of flakey service it was shutdown by Yahoo! in June 2015.

Pipes inspired another service IFTTT. IFTTT stands for ‘If then, then that’. It is a simple cause and effect framework that allows for the automation of actions over the web. These cause and effect formulas called recipes. It supports a range of web services and apps. Most of the discussion around this for Intenet of Things automation. I use it to automate my web content content.

More in part two.

I pulled part one together in a companion presentation.

More related content can be found here.

More information

Hemingway OSX application

Pinboard

Pinner app for iOS

IFTTT – (If Then, Then That)

Books

Learning Unix for OS X: Going Deep With the Terminal and Shell by Dave Taylor

UNIX in a Nutshell by Arnold Robbins
March 21, 2016
On wearing a smart watch
At the beginning of the month I took the plunge and decided to buy a Casio G-Shock connected watch. After a week or of wearing a smart watch, I have a pretty good sense of the pros and cons of using it.

The connection with the iPhone makes a major leap forward in the G-Shock experience. Using a G-Shock is rather like using an old computer system like a DEC VAX minicomputer, the experience is modal. Everything revolves around combinations of button pushes to get to the functionality of the watch. Realistically you can’t navigate this process while wearing a smart watch. The manual is a quarter of an inch thick and the commands not exactly memorable. If you have clumsy fingers or are not paying attention you have to cycle through the complete set of button commands again

The G+ iPhone application deals with every setting on the watch bar setting the time and date itself (which still requires a bit of button juggling).

The achilles heel is battery life. Most of the facilities about the watch are about husbanding a relatively meagre lithium ion battery. What Casio’s engineers managed to achieve is imperfect but impressive. The battery life is the silent hand that ruled all aspects of the product design. In order to have a sealed in battery that lasted more than a day, Casio had to go with an old school battery. Out went modern G-Shock features such as the GPS module and atomic clock radio units used to provide accurate time based on location.

Out too went the solar power option. Alerts seem to be polled every quarter of an hour for things like email. But then in this connected age, having a message to let me know that I don’t have email would be more noteworthy.

This all had a number of effects:
- The watch didn’t alert me to everything – that isn’t a bad thing. I do want my alerts to be consistent, so I shut down alerts from everything but Twitter, calendar and calls. I would have loved to have alerts for WeChat, SMS / iMessage messages, FaceTime and Skype calls but they aren’t on the programme (so far)
- The watch did cure ‘phantom’ rings. I got to ignore ringtones out in public and at home unless my wrist shook. It also worked well when I couldn’t feel my phone vibrating in my Carhartt jacket
- I remembered to take my phone with me on more occasions, the watch would vibrate if the Bluetooth link was broken
The best bit of the phone for me was that it was still a G-Shock, it could be worn in the gym, the shower, whilst shaving, washing dishes or swimming. It is a watch for living rather than a Bluetooth-enabled human leash.

More information
On smart watches, I’ve decided to take the plunge
October 20, 2014
Rocket Fuel instant coffee

I was dubious when I first saw Rocket Fuel with a packaging and copywriting that brought me back to the early 1990s.

First a velvet rush like no other of caffeine rich smoothness, then a sustained hit of all natural Guarana

I presume this is to try and tap into a mind hack caffiene culture like they have in the US where Jolt cola and Penguin caffeineated mints are sold. Rocket Fuel type caffeine culture comes from gamers, hackers and coders. This has spawned a category of ‘stimulation’ drinks, that are small in volume like Asian pick me up products, notably Taisho Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd’s Lipovitan D or House Wellness Foods Corp’s new drink product C1000 Vitamin Lemon.

These stimulation drinks compete head on with hot coffee and energy drinks like Monster to provide altertness and sustained cognitive performance.

As a product Rocket Fuel in essence, is caffeine in two forms: coffee beans and guarana. I presume that one is a faster release than the other so you get more of a sustained caffeine buzz for your buck.

Unfortunately it looks like its an oversized bottle of amyl nitrate procured from a sex shop for giants. The font flame colour scheme is supposed to evoke the visual language of Lucozade.

So what’s it like?

Firstly, whilst the flavour isn’t for anyone who loves coffee as a drink. It would only compare favourably with coffee, if you liked to drink the likes of Nescafé Original or Maxwell House.

Secondly, the caffeine up seems to last appreciably longer than when I usually drink instant coffee. This might be psychological, but I feld that it had a more sustained effect than would otherwise be the case. You can get your fix via Amazon if you are that desperate to mainline caffeine. But if you care about your tastebuds go elsewhere.

More FMCG related content can be found here.

October 25, 2012