Ged Carroll

Category: gadget | 小工具 | 가제트 | ガジェット

What constitutes a gadget? The dictionary definition would be a small mechanical or electronic device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.

When I started writing this blog the gadget section focused on personal digital assistants such as the Palm PDA and Sony’s Clie devices. Or the Anoto digital pen that allowed you to record digitally what had been written on a specially marked out paper page, giving the best of both experiences.

Some of the ideas I shared weren’t so small like a Panasonic sleeping room for sleep starved, but well heeled Japanese.

When cutting edge technology failed me, I periodically went back to older technology such as the Nokia 8850 cellphone or my love of the Nokia E90 Communicator.

I also started looking back to discontinued products like the Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro, one of the best cassette decks ever made of any size. I knew people who used it in their hi-fi systems as well as for portable audio.

Some of the technology that I looked at were products that marked a particular point in my life such as my college days with the Apple StyleWriter II. While my college peers were worried about getting on laser printers to submit assignments, I had a stack of cartridges cotton buds and isopropyl alcohol to deal with any non catastrophic printer issues and so could print during the evening in the comfort of my lodgings.

Alongside the demise in prominence of the gadget, there has been a rise in the trend of everyday carry or EDC.

  • Gatekeeping + more things

    Gatekeeping

    I wish gatekeeping was a thing back in 2005 and 2006 when I was working on the international launch of Yahoo! Answers. The problem that we had was getting people to contribute answers to questions. Gatekeeping and the exhortation to not gate keep is about sharing knowledge and opinions freely – an in real life version of what we saw in early social publishing. Ironically gatekeeping stands in sharp contrast to oversharing as a social faux pas. The kind of knowledge that concerns about gatekeeping is particularly opposed to is opinion based knowledge or NORA.

    Now ‘your jam’ is no longer your jam, but instead offered up to be other people’s jam instead. Your individuality ready to be cloned at a moments notice. Will everything descend to being ‘basic’ or mainstream? Does it disincentivise possessing good taste?

    img_0364

    What the Internet’s Use of ‘Gatekeeping’ Says About Power – The rise of “Don’t gatekeep” has reframed keeping things to yourself as a selfish act. But not everything is for everyone! And sometimes the act of sharing does more harm than good. I’m thinking of how Anthony Bourdain felt conflicted about sending droves of tourists to mom-and-pop restaurants. I’m thinking of gentrification and what happens when certain neighborhoods are positioned as hidden gems.

    Beauty

    Why Groupe L’Occitane may delist from the Hong Kong stock exchange | Vogue Business

    Consumer behaviour

    My Generation, by Justin E. H. Smith – captures a sense of now rather than a generation

    Economics

    Study Times op-ed shoots down new policy options | Pekingology – translation from an article from the Study Times. Comments on infrastructure are particularly instructive in terms of the view point that they reflect: To debunk views such as “infrastructure overcapacity is wasteful,” “promoting infrastructure equates to taking the old path that’s inconsistent with high-quality development,” and “limited space,” it’s crucial to fully understand the role of infrastructure investment from a holistic perspective of national economic development. Infrastructure investment doesn’t only interact with the expansion of aggregate demand to stabilize economic operations, but also enhances macroeconomic efficiency, improves people’s living standards, and robustly supports high-quality development. Overall, there’s no issue of excessive infrastructure. On the contrary, there are areas that hinder the efficiency of the national economy and the improvement of people’s living standards. China’s per capita infrastructure capital stock only accounts for 20% to 30% of the developed countries, and public facility investments per rural resident are only about a fifth of an urban dweller, indicating potential for investment

    New analysis reveals how Porsche-VW ‘short squeeze’ distorted the stock market | The University of Kansas 

    Energy

    US airlines ally with farmers to seek subsidies for corn as jet fuel | Financial Times 

    FMCG

    Reckitt Benckiser: too many sterile quarters leave share price flat | Financial Times 

    McDonald’s Hong Kong and Kevin Poon “Coach McNugget Art World” Exhibition | Hypebeast – via Ian at Deft. This was to celebrate 40 years of the McNugget. McDonald’s have always done some smart cultural marketing work in Hong Kong (such as an McDonalds Big Mac themed issue of Milk magazine). Hong Kong seems like a natural home for these things, I remember activating a Coke Zero x Neighborhood collab while there.) But it isn’t only a Hong Kong thing, McDonalds has done some strong cultural marketing internationally as well: from the Cactus Jack happy meal to a bounty programme for rappers that namedropped McDonalds on their mixtape over the years. As my friend Ian observed this is at odds with their current UK positioning ‘ McDonalds is the perfect place for estranged parents to meet their kids for awkward conversations’. The implication in that McDonalds restaurants are a lower rent third space (than Starbucks or Costa) positioning. I have welcomed their value-priced coffee and breakfasts at the end of an all-nighter on a pitch or a long drive. But the UK’s the third space aspect loses all the joy that McDonalds manages to imbue in their children experiences – the treat, the birthday party, the expectation of picking up a much wanted toy in a happy meal. The child to adult disconnect in the experience is something cultural marketing like this can help bridge if done in the UK.

    Gadgets

    US Feature Phone Market Stages Comeback as Gen Z, Millennials Advocate Digital Detox | Counterpoint Research – the reasons are more diffuse than this article is letting on. People like my parents are being forced to get new feature phones by network upgrades. Some people can’t use a smartphone and then there is the digital detox brigade which spans generations, people who need tough phones AND people still needing second phones

    Germany

    TSMC’s New Fab in Germany – by Jon Y – focus around automotive just has Germany has been caught on the wrong side of the move to electric cars

    Chinese responses to Germany’s China strategy: Attack abroad, assuage at home | Merics

    Health

    Unravelling the Link Between Socioeconomic Status and Obesity | INSEAD Knowledge

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong’s corporate lawyers test boundaries as Beijing’s influence grows | Financial Times – legal practitioners, including corporate lawyers, are concerned the broadening scope of a sweeping national security law could jeopardise the independence of the city’s legal system, a legacy of British administration, as Beijing tightens its grip. “There is general concern . . . that people are not fully understanding where the boundaries lie,” said a senior corporate lawyer with a global firm who has worked in Hong Kong for more than two decades

    The Great Dilution: Hong Kong’s Changing Population Mix | Asian Sentinel

    Hong Kong delays Jimmy Lai trial as police question woman linked to exiled lawmaker | Radio Free Asia

    Innovation

    FDA Largely to Blame for Physicians’ Misperceptions on Nicotine | RealClearPolicy

    Materials

    DARPA looks to monetise the Moon | EE Times 

    Media

    Artificial Intelligence Lawsuit: AI-Generated Art Not Copyrightable – The Hollywood Reporter

    Online

    What is dark social and why does it matter for your brand? – New Digital Age 

    ICANN warns UN may sideline techies from internet governace • The Register – move towards China’s vision of cyber-sovereignty

    Retailing

    Small retailers and fans step in as Nike refuses to make replica Mary Earps shirt | England women’s football team | The Guardian 

    Security

    US nuclear submarine weak spot in bubble trail: Chinese scientists | South China Morning Post

    New Supply Chain Attack Hit Close to 100 Victims—and Clues Point to China | WIRED and Dark Reading’s take: Chinese APT Targets Hong Kong in Supply Chain Attack 

    Daring Fireball: ‘Changes to U.K. Surveillance Regime May Violate International Law’ – As I see it, the most likely outcome is that the U.K. passes the law, thinking that the grave concerns conveyed to them by the messaging services are overblown. That the platform providers are saying they can’t comply but they really just mean they don’t want to comply because it’s just difficult, not impossible. And when it becomes law, the platforms will hand it off to the nerds, the nerds will nerd harder, and boom, the platforms will fall into compliance with this law. That’s what they think will happen. What will actually happen, I believe, is that E2EE messaging platforms like WhatsApp (overwhelmingly popular in the U.K.), Signal, and iMessage will stop working and be pulled from app stores in the U.K., full stop. The U.K. seems to think it’s a bluff; I don’t

    Singapore

    Money Laundering Bust Puts Foreign Wealth in Singapore on Notice | Asia Sentinel – if that occurred at the behest of the China then we’re likely to see flight overseas from Singapore. It’s also interesting that these raids have come soon after China arrested a Shanghai immigration consultant to get hold of their database of UHNWI overseas (predominantly in the US). They second question I had would be why Singapore would cooperate with China on this?

    Software

    Now is the time for grimoires – by Ethan Mollick – With the rise of a new form of AI, the Large Language Model, organizations continue to think that whoever controls the data is going to win. But at least in the near future, I not only think they are wrong, but also that this approach blinds them to the most useful thing that they (and all of us), can be doing in this AI-haunted moment: creating grimoires, spellbooks full of prompts that encode expertise. The largest Large Language Models, like GPT-4, already have trained on tons of data. They “know” many things, which is why they beat Stanford Medical School students when evaluating new medical cases and Harvard students at essay writing, despite their tendency to hallucinate wrong answers. It may well be that more data is indeed widely useful — companies are training their own LLMs, and going through substantial effort to fine-tune existing models on their data based on this assumption — but we don’t actually know that, yet. In the meantime, there is something that is clearly important, and that is the prompts of experts.

    Style

    Where Streetwear and Tech Cross Paths: ASUS Vivobook X BAPE® – one of the more cynical collaborations that I have seen with streetwear brands

    Technology

    Deal to develop generative AI on quantum computer | EE Times – how will quantum computing affect a GPT type Bayesian model?

    Web of no web

    Trybals is a YouTube channel that features people from the less developed parts of Pakistan and asks their reactions about different aspects of the modern world. It’s an interesting bit of anthropology. In this episode the panel gets to try a VR experience.

  • Geico advertising + more things

    Geico advertising

    What prompted me to write about Geico advertising was a stream of news from marketing services companies about the state of technology company advertising. At the time of writing Stagwell are just the latest marketing services firm after S4, IPG, Omnicom and WPP have pinned declining profits on a reduction in technology company advertising spend. Then this story broke about Geico advertising: Insurer Geico made more money after benching its famous gecko | Quartz – and my first reaction was that the wrong lessons might be taken away from this.

    Fence

    Geico advertising – a primer

    Geico îs an unfamiliar name to most people outside of the US. If you’ve read American magazines chances are there was a print ad or two in there with their iconic Gecko spokesperson. It’s a similar case on American television.

    Geico advertising and their Gecko are as familiar to Americans as the meerkats of Comparethemarket.com are to your average Brits.

    The truth about technology marketers vs. Geico advertising

    Having worked with technology brands on and off for the past three decades, I have enough experience to know that generally, they aren’t great marketing organisations.

    Coinbase’s Super Bowl ad drove traffic to a site that fell over.
    Geico reinforced brand equity in the insurance space and pointed out their 24-hour claims hotline (I imagine that this isn’t an exclusive feature, but you wouldn’t know it from the advert).

    Growth mindset ≠ marketing mindset

    As organisations, they have a growth mindset, but not a marketing mindset. Before the internet, this meant a powerful field sales force organisation and marketing meant a bit of branding / design work coupled with case studies for the sales people. With the internet came constant iterative ‘growth hacking’ on digital channels, that mirrors agile software development rather than the best practices of marketing science.

    There is a good reason why organisations like the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science are supported by FMCG manufacturers, luxury goods makers, media companies, marketing services firms and pharmaceutical companies, BUT has no technology company sponsors.

    The reasons are cultural in nature:

    • Engineering – if I haven’t heard of it or invented it then it’s not valid and you’re just a suit. At best great product is the marketing – and that’s great if you have a clearly differentiated great product which is self evident. The engineering mindset is also why they trust adtech and marketing automation services which outsource your marketing communications approach to a black box
    • Sales – marketing is just support. Which is the reason why my early clients (like old school Silicon Valley royalty LSI Logic) promoted long serving secretaries and administration staff into marketing roles
    • Even if they had a marketer who knew about Ehrenberg-Bass they wouldn’t be able to get in buy-in from the wider organisation to participate and they’d likely be fighting other dumpster fires elsewhere

    Secondly, their laser focus on data affects their outlook. To paraphrase the comedian Bill Hicks: they know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Because they are only looking at short term data. Great marketing and advertising also has long term effects that both screws with the short term marketing data focus.

    Marketing and growth hacking are considered synonymous. It would seem ridiculous for me to to claim in any large marketing orientated organisation that sales and marketing are synonymous. The differences and complementary aspects of both would be well known. Yet in technology companies, this isn’t the case.

    By contrast Geico as a brand is an organisation who understood marketing. You make your car or house insurance decision at best once a year (though there is friction in making a change).

    The technology sector approach would be for Geico to bid on search ads and aggregators to acquire customers and then do direct mail or email when it comes to renewal times. But Geico advertising does something different. Geico advertising builds mental framework, so that Geico means car insurance and will be one of the brands that you consider.

    This achieves a few things:

    • You are less likely to move away from Geico, you may not love them, but searching for an alternative might be too much of a hassle.
    • You may be reassured that you have chosen ‘the’ car insurance
    • It helps new customers get over the ‘which car insurance company to choose’ decision
    • It helps with upsell on the products due to the reassurance of the brand

    Technology companies deal with these problems in a slightly different way:

    • Certification of engineering staff. If you are Microsoft certified or Cisco certified, you are less likely to use open source software or Juniper Networks products respectively. It would be against your self interest and the investment in terms of time and money that you have made in your self development
    • Contractual lock-in – self explanatory
    • Technology lock-in. You can put your data or programming code into a particular system, but its much harder and more expensive to move on to another system
    • Owning the entire technology stack. This is the approach that Adobe Systems have taken, gradually acquiring over the years the entire marketing, workflow and creative systems used by ad agencies, media agencies and their clients

    So why was Geico advertising spend cut?

    This is the crux of my point about how the wrong lessons might be taken away from the Geico advertising spend cut, with no ‘apparent’ impact.

    There are a number of good reasons why Geico made the cut in advertising spend:

    • There was a cut in insurance sector advertising overall, so that Geico maintained or even grew its relative share of voice while spending less. This should see it emerge with improved economic performance over time. Procter and Gamble became the behemoth it now is by INCREASING advertising during the great depression of the 1920s. So the idea of relative share of voice and its relationship to market share is older than I am. Further more research by the IPA has found that holding or increasing relative share of voice during a downturn has a positive impact for business performance over a five year period
    • Geico may have managed to make some efficiency gains, this is most likely to occur in brand activating activities

    There is also a bad reason: saving money in the short term. Kraft Heinz cut marketing to the bone under the guise of zero based budgeting (ZBB) – which made a mockery of ZBB as a concept. Kraft Heinz shares massively underperformed and were down 60% in the last 5 years, compared to the S&P 500 having gone up 69%. If Geico is following this route then it bodes ill for the long term performance of the business.

    Without us knowing the real reasons and focusing on the short term measure, it reinforces a growth hacking mindset.

    Beauty

    Beauty hotspots: Why global giants are circling Australian brands | Vogue Business – well developed brands, celebrity and influencer brands have less longevity and are over-priced by comparison

    Trends Shaping the Future of the Skincare Industry | Mintel 

    Farfetch to shut down its beauty business | Vogue Business – interesting e-commerce specific issues

    Business

    A Chinese Electronics Empire – The Wire China  – on Midea

    China

    The China Convergence – by N.S. Lyons – The Upheaval

    Chinese developer’s cancelled share placement fuels property sector woes | Financial Times – this is interesting as Country Garden is one of the country’s better run developers and hasn’t done as many things that could be considered hubristic in nature. And the second shoe drops: China’s Country Garden misses bond payments as turmoil grips property sector | Financial Times

    Anger in China over plan to use cities as ‘moat’ to save Beijing from floods | China | The Guardian

    China’s embassy to Russia criticises treatment of citizens at border | Reuters 

    Weekly news roundup: China’s strides and setbacks in semiconductor self-sufficiency and other top stories – interesting that China is going for self sufficiency across all aspects of semiconductors from raw materials to processes

    Reckoning in China: Behind Xi Jinping’s Firing of Top Beijing Officials | Daily Beast

    White House unveils ban on US investment in Chinese tech sectors | Financial Times 

    Chinese economy falls into deflation as recovery stumbles | Financial Times 

    China’s Plan to Rule the World’s Smart Devices, FCC Urged to Act | Newsweek

    Consumer behaviour

    Invasion of Food Delivery Robots is Driving People to Vandalism and Theft | Futurism – no opportunity is bringing out the worst in some people

    Hard times mean no sustainability premium in North America | WARC | The Feed – every single economic recession this comes around and marketers are surprised. Time to pay attention to what the longitudinal research data says. I really like the work that Gallup have done on macro trends and the American consumer, in particular their work on attitudes to the environment.

    Culture

    Remnants of curry dating back 1,800 years found on stone tools in Southeast Asia is oldest outside India | South China Morning Post 

    Economics

    Risk perceptions and economic activity in the United Kingdom | Bank Underground

    VC Optimism Returning But More Pain Ahead In Their Portfolios | Hunter Walk 

    Energy

    The growth of lithium-ion battery power | The Economist – hitting a natural limit of price / energy provided

    Gadgets

    Apple seeks to bolster expertise in generative AI on mobile devices | Financial Times

    Germany

    Bertelsmann Investments to plough $700mn into Chinese start-ups | Financial Times

    Health

    ‘Pokémon Sleep’ Review: Sleep-Tracking Game Made Me Into Snorlax – gamifying sleep. Pokemon Sleep has surged to 3.2M global downloads and an estimated $130k in daily revenue according to SensorTower data. The app ranked in the top 5 in the U.S. Games charts. It’s even more popular in Japan (the home of Pokemon), where it’s number 1 across the App Store categories

    MSLs drive 1.5x adoption in first six months | Klick Wire – launch tactic

    Hong Kong

    Bruce Lee’s legacy squares up to modern life in Hong Kong | Reuters

    ‘Long-distance’ is the new ‘soft’ | Big Lychee, Various Sectors

    Canadian Case Exposes Hong Kong Developer’s Corporate Ties to Chinese Criminal Underworld – OCCRP 

    How to

    INFER Public | The Pub Blog – Using AI to improve your forecast rationale 

    Japan

    FEATURE: Samurai and Son – The Oral History of SHOGUN ASSASSIN! – Tokyoscope has the inside track on the American version of Lone Wolf & Cub part two

    Luxury

    Bentley’s global sales drop 4pc in first half of 2023 | Luxury Daily 

    Marketing

    Using attention to scale creative excellence at Mars | WARC – Sales, distinctive assets, and attention to advertising are the go-to metrics to guide marketing decisions at Mars. Mars use Attention as a pre-testing tool, to inform creative choices in digital and also proxy in TV. Mars believe that an execution with a better attention score will travel across media channels better and will be a safer bet for you when you need to make a choice. Measuring Attention is a key element in helping us improve the creative hit rate. Advertisers should question how they measure consumer responses and focus on measures of real consumer behavior.

    Thinkerbell co-founders on life after PwC – by Tim Burrowes 

    Materials

    Musk still mulling massive Tesla plant for Indonesia | Asia Times – Indonesia is one of the biggest supplies of Nickel in the world and have been focused on exploiting it in a way that maximises the economic benefit to Indonesians

    Media

    Advertising has reached a new low in the age of podcasts | Financial Times and WPP & Spotify announce first-of-its-kind global partnership | WPP 

    Influencer Marketing on Instagram: Empirical Research on Social Media Engagement with Sponsored Posts and Sponsored posts and microinfluencers deliver greater engagement on Instagram | WARC – Sponsored posts of social media influencers (SMIs) outperformed their non-sponsored posts in terms of generating more comments and “likes” than NSPs. The average number of engagements for sponsored posts was 1,559.2, beating a comparative figure of 1,157.4 for non-sponsored posts. Median engagement totals for sponsored posts came in at 747, while the median engagement for NSPs stood at 401.

    Online

    China proposes tighter limits on children’s use of tech | Financial Times

    How effective is Russian propaganda? | Financial Times 

    LinkedIn Workplace Halts Services in China Starting Today – Pandaily – I was a bit surprised as I thought Linkedn had left a few years ago

    Security

    UK defence group BAE Systems lifts profit forecast as military spending soars | Financial Times and Britain’s investors shy away from UK defence companies | Financial Times 

    The untold history of today’s Russian-speaking hackers | Financial Times 

    Former U.S. Officials Urge New Export Alliance on China – EE Times 

    Microsoft downplays damaging report on Chinese hacking its own engineers vetted – this could go bad for Microsoft: US senator victim-blames Microsoft for Chinese hack 

    Five Eyes nations list 12 most exploited vulnerabilities • The Register – Fortinet products are coming off very badly in this list

    Fortinet’s security issues have aligned with a reluctance for customers to upgrade their business with the company

    Exclusive: North Korean hackers breached top Russian missile maker | Reuters

    On publicizing Chinese hacking success – by Graham Webster – really interesting observations here

    Drug-related killings add to instability in Syria’s south | Asia Times 

    Software

    Should an AI bot making $1mn really be the next Turing test? | Financial Times – also what does it say about being human?

    Zoom wants to train its AI on content from all user calls | Quartz – combine the legal overreach with concerns about Zoom’s connections with the Chinese government and you can see how bad this is likely to get

    Style

    Yeezy drops are still boosting Adidas profits | Vogue Business 

    Technology

    AMD Q2 – Building Momentum? | Digits to Dollars 

    Radar Trends to Watch: August 2023 – O’Reilly 

    White House unveils ban on US investment in Chinese tech sectors | Financial Times 

    Web of no web

    Taiwan’s satellite supply chain empowering international market entry

  • Casio G-Shock GW6900

    Four years ago I wrote about the Casio G-Shock GWF-D1000 Frogman, this post is about a much more humble member of the same family the Casio G-Shock GW6900. The GW6900 is an update of the classic Casio DW6900 shape. This gives it a button on the front below the watch face to turn the back light on, very similar to the later 9400 Rangeman series.

    This makes it easier to light up than the original 5600 series G-Shocks and many of the other models including my beloved Frogman models.

    No name

    The GW6900 is much more humble. It has no name like other models. It’s cheap and ubiquitous in nature, being the ‘everyman’ of G-shock models. It has looks that while discreet feel like it was an artefact from a 1980s anime cartoon series with giant mecha, with its soft roundness and form follows function urethane armoured protection.

    What changed to make the DW6900 series into the GW6900? Out goes the need to change the battery every few years. Instead you get solar charging and the use of radio signals set the watch with atomic clock accuracy.

    Glow in the dark

    Electroluminescent technology can trace its way back to work that GE was doing in the US during the early 1960s. GE was making electroluminescent dash instruments for Dodge Charger cars from the 1960 model year. Below is an example via Wikipedia taken by Jonathan Gibbs in a 1966 Charger.

    IMG_0270 (1)
    Fastback Jon

    With the GW6900, you still get the turquoise electroluminescent illumination that Timex first made famous with their Indiglo watches in the early 1990s. The reality was that electroluminescent thin film materials were becoming a thing and Sharp in Japan and Planar in the US were rolling out the display technology during the 1980s. But the glow still takes me back to early 1990s dark warehouses with sporadic bursts of these watch screens.

    The case is unchanged as is the strap. A pleasing resin material that quickly adapts to the wearer over a few weeks and becomes smoother to the touch. It feels quite ‘dainty’ on the wrist compared to an Apple Watch or a modern sports watch, yet it’s been robust enough for use by law enforcement and the military, until smartwatches gradually took over. Now the G6900 and its ilk have been gradually replaced by the Garmin Tactix and Apple Watch Ultra models.

    https://flic.kr/p/2oNmfJX

    The main section of the display allows you to have have two time zones displayed and is generally glanceable. The night light works well, but the display can ‘wash out’ a little. Upgrading the light to an LED would provide a greater degree of contrast to make the watch more legible when reading with the backlight.

    As for the three ring displays at the top of the watch display. The first gives you an idea of battery charge. The second gives you an indication if functions like an alarm or hourly chime is turned on and the third one visualises ten second segments for no apparent reason.

    A simple watch

    The GW6900 is a simple watch. It won’t make you more sexually attractive or boost your apparent status. It won’t keep you up with the latest online happenings. But it will keep on running even in the most arduous of circumstances and will tell you the time in the middle of the night due to it’s easy to find light button.

    I am happy with a simple watch.

    Watch ownership as a rite of passage

    When I was a child, having your own watch was a right of passage similar to getting your first smartphone today. Knowing the time gave you more control over your life, pulling my phone out of my pocket to look at the time doesn’t scratch ‘knowing the time’ itch in quite the same way. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I can find smartwatches intrusive at times with their constant reminders and need to be charged.

    But at the same time I want to know I have the time with just a twist of the wrist away.

    After owning your first watch at school, the idea of getting an ‘adult watch’ was the next big thing: buying a quality watch for life.

    COVID seemed to bring people back to owning a serious watch. Serious watches became more of a mainstream thing, although a good watch is now viewed as an investment opportunity, and luxury watch flipping a side hustle. Alongside these developments, watch robberies seem to have taken off, so a humbler watch seems to be a prudent measure when I am out and about in London.

    The Casio GW6900 is the grey man of watches, tough enough for life, but tame enough to go unnoticed. It doesn’t hurt that it costs less than 100 pounds.

  • SCSI + more things

    SCSI

    SCSI was a huge part of my early computer life. It was the way my Mac connected to external hard drives, printers, optical scanners and early optical drives.

    https://flic.kr/p/bX3XA
    Sun Microsystems computers used SCSI to and powered the dot com boom.

    SCSI still lives on as a software layer in enterprise computer systems connecting storage together. It even exists within the USB mass storage device class.

    SCSI is a reminder that technology is often build of layers of older technologies.

    Consumer behaviour

    Meet the Psychedelic Boom’s First Responders | WIRED – this is likely to end very badly for some people. Having known people who had bad experiences growing up, I am leery of the trend towards psychedelics

    Economics

    The slow death of downtown San Francisco | U.S. | EL PAÍS English – San Francisco’s problem is now as much reputational as it is economics now with the city labeled as being in a ‘doom loop’. Much of the blame seems to sit with the city administration under Mayor London Breed.

    https://flic.kr/p/P2Pe3q
    San Francisco mayor London Breed

    Energy

    Saudi Arabia and Russia are trying to make oil more expensive | Quartz – KSA’s biggest problem had been that Russia hadn’t honoured its rate cuts to date. We’ll see if they do so

    Finance

    Don’t lose the exponential benefits of fractional share trading | Financial Times

    Gadgets

    Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans | Financial Times – not terribly surprising. I suspect that the problem is sourcing some of the components such as the screens. I imagine that there are challenges with manufacturing yields and throughput.

    Start-ups: smart clothes have been wearing experience for investors | Financial Times – smart fabrics didn’t win out over wearables

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong national security law: who are the 8 targeted with HK$1 million bounties? Calls for sanctions, links to 2019 protests among alleged offences | South China Morning Post 

    How to

    How to Use FiveFilters to Create RSS Feeds for Any Web Page

    Japan

    Radio Taisō: A Nuanced History of a Nearly 100-Year-Old Tradition – Unseen Japan

    Materials

    Great summary of the current state of rare earth metals processing. China appreciated the strategic nature of these materials before everyone else did and has been prepared to tolerate a high degrees of pollution in processing to build a monopoly.

    Online

    Skype was a thing in the early 2000s. I knew companies that used it in a similar way to FaceTime now. I used it for conference calls and video calls with friends around the world. I had completely forgot that eBay had bought Skype, I could only remember Silverlake acquired it and then sold it on to Microsoft.

    Google Says It’ll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI | Gizmodo 

    Twitter says users must be verified to access TweetDeck | Reuters 

    Quality

    57 ‘Buy It for Life’ Products: Cast-Iron, Tools, Speakers, Chairs, and More | WIRED

    Security

    Another Stumble: German Intelligence Criticized for Slow Handling of Russian Coup Attempt – DER SPIEGEL 

  • Tools are changing

    I was sat thinking about a client project the other day. I was using Miro as a way to articulate my thoughts into something that the creatives could work with. As I stared off at a Post-It note on my wall that made up part of the prototype the idea that the tools are changing sailed in and sat at the front of my thoughts. I became deeply uncomfortable.

    At a conscious level I know that technology and the tools that I use based on it are changing all the time. But what made me more uncomfortable was a deeper shift in the model of how the tools interacted with me and where the control sat. Sometimes it feels as if we longer use them, instead they use us. To what end has never been clearly articulated.

    This quote from my first agency boss describes the nascent online landscape of the late 1990s:

    After 50 years of radio and TV pushing marketing messages at people, it took technology to turn it around so that people pull in the information they want. Today’s new consumer has a cultural comfort with interactivity that just keeps building on itself, and it’s all because the technology is finally where it needs to be to let them do it.

    Larry Weber on the old Weber Group website

    I just couldn’t imagine the same thing being said about the experience of most netizens in our social platform dominated world today. The tools are changing, they now use us more than we use them.

    I was particularly struck by this statement quoted in a BBC article and attributed to Thomas Bangalter

    “Daft Punk was a project that blurred the line between reality and fiction with these robot characters. It was a very important point for me and Guy-Man[uel] to not spoil the narrative while it was happening. 

    “Now the story has ended, it felt interesting to reveal part of the creative process that is very much human-based and not algorithmic of any sort.”

    That was, he says, Daft Punk’s central thesis: That the line between humanity and technology should remain absolute.

    “It was an exploration, I would say, starting with the machines and going away from them. I love technology as a tool [but] I’m somehow terrified of the nature of the relationship between the machines and ourselves.”

    Life after Daft Punk: Thomas Bangalter on ballet, AI and ditching the helmet by Mark Savage – BBC (April 4, 2023

    Why tools are changing

    The Apple Mac: a bicycle for the mind

    A couple of my friends had home computers that were used as glorified games consoles. There was little technological value in playing Daley Thompson’s Decathlon or Frogger using the rubbery keyboard of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. My school had a computer lab with three seldom used BBC microcomputers and I had one lesson on using Excel during my time in school. This all meant that I really came to computing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I was a self taught Mac user. From someone who was used to hand writing or typing documents, cut-and-paste was a radical new way of creating a document.

    Having my own Mac and printer helped me get through my degree relatively stress free compared to my peers who largely relied on the University’s computer and printing services facilities.

    Over the time I have used computing, I’ve noticed that technology tools are changing and not for the better. Computers were seen to be personally empowering and enabling. This age of computing is encapsulated by a phrase attributed to Steve Jobs about the Mac being ‘a bicycle for the mind‘. Steve Jobs also used the analogy of a computing appliance and used both Cuisinart and Sony product philosophies as exemplars for the Apple II and Mac.

    https://youtu.be/L40B08nWoMk

    In many respect, this was similar to the vision that Stewart Brand had for the ‘back to the land’ hippie movement bible The Whole Earth catalog. The subtitle of the catalog was ‘Access to Tools’. The tools in question were an assortment of recommendations including books, maps, garden implements, specialised clothing, woodworking tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, early synthesizers, and personal computers.

    Mother of All Demos

    Throughout his life Brand has had a knack of being at the right place and at the right time. Including help facilitate Doug Engelbart’s ‘Mother of All Demos‘ – a public demonstration of prototype technologies that mapped out our digital age. Being in the audience for the Mother of All Demos must have been mind-blowing at the time. For an audience that would have found computer terminals transformative, there would have been a realisation that their tools are changing right in front of their eyes.

    Cuisinart

    https://flic.kr/p/aEdPSb
    Mac Classic

    The rounded edges and corners of the Apple II’s plastic case was inspired by Cuisinart, as was the Mac Classic’s ‘sit up and beg‘ stance. The idea that the the Mac was a ‘computing appliance’; something that just worked. For IT professionals of a certain age who had invested in Microsoft skills, this was mistaken for the Mac being a ‘toy’.

    Before the web, this led to a religious type split. I have been a proud Mac user since 1989, which gives you an idea on where I sat. The IT professionals did not believe in personal user empowerment, but they would also struggle with the way tools are changing now as well. The thinking of these IT professionals can be seen in the clunky experience of using SAP enterprise software today.

    The overlooked HyperCard

    https://flic.kr/p/9hhBeZ

    Some of the tools were brilliant ideas but didn’t get widespread adoption. My personal favourite of software in this category would be Apple’s HyperCard. HyperCard was a framework that allowed you to build processes from an address book or digital brochures to mind-blowing experiences and even running factories.

    For example, Northwest Airlines managed their entire plane maintenance management programme using HyperCard. Nabisco ran at least one factory using HyperCard as an enterprise resource planning platform.

    HyperCard was ‘No Code Tools‘ before the founders of AirTable or Zoho Creator were even born.

    Danny Goodman who wrote a lot of the guides to HyperCard, went on to write some of the best books for programming assorted web and mobile technologies from JavaScript to iOS development.

    This empowerment extended to many web technologies and web services. Email, forums and chat apps radically changed business and personal networks. It was now easier to access information and expertise. The late 1990s and email saw increased worker collaboration across offices and departments. You saw services like Yahoo! Pipes provided to ‘power-user’ consumer netizens during the Web 2.0 era. RSS newsreaders like Newsblur do a similar job, as do social bookmarking services like pinboard.in.

    Modal interfaces and software buttons

    When electronic products first moved into the home they had mechanical buttons. Buttons limited functionality, but allowed for the creation of highly intuitive products. Buttons have since been proven to be faster and safer to use automotive applications than touch screens. The use of touch screens being driven as by the car manufacturers marketing department. Logic controls were buttons connected to servos that provided a slimmer finish, a more sophisticated looking product.

    Depending on the device they also allowed for the use of software.

    https://flic.kr/p/J1Vnkd

    But sophistication gave way to confusion as buttons often had to do multiple jobs and use a modal interface. I spent a good deal of my childhood programming my parents video recorders and setting the time on their digital watches and clocks in the home and the car.

    Modal interfaces have their place. During my time as a student I worked for MBNA in customer service roles. The modal interface of the CardPac software allowed me to move around a customer record much faster than a point and click ‘windows type’ application. This was particularly important handling stressed customers who have been waiting to speak to a customer services rep in a phone queue.

    I would switch into edit mode and quickly tab through fields of data faster than scrolling down and hunting and pecking with a mouse and cursor.

    It’s not so much fun if you make one error programming a mid-1980s video cassette recorder and have to go cycle through the rest of the process to go back to the beginning and start again.

    You also started to see software defined buttons. This appeared on machine tools and music instruments first. If there was ‘Mac like moment’ for software defined switches, it was the launch of the first commercially successful digital synthesiser: the Yamaha DX-7.

    The Yamaha DX7 was so powerful, yet challenging to use – that a veritable cottage industry of books and tutorial videos like the one above. One of the most prominent manual writers was Lorenz Rychner, who wrote guides for various Yamaha electronic instruments as well as later Casio, Kawai, Korg and Roland instruments that was inspired by the Yamaha DX7. Eventually when personal computers became used in music production, Yamaha DX7 editing software appeared as well.

    Getting these electronic instruments to work saw a new artist credit appear on albums and singles; that of MIDI programmer. In the 1980s, the audio tools are changing, but experts are required to get the most out of them due to software defined buttons. Apple took this to its natural extreme with a MacBook Pro model that replaced function keys with a touch screen that changes controls based on what software programme is being used at a given time.

    Pictures under glass

    Technology allowed the entire display surface to become software defined buttons, directly with your fingers. This robbed people of the tactic feedback of a button, knob or lever to create a phenomenon of ‘pictures under glass‘. This changes our relationship between our tools and how we interact with them. It also opened up new ways of interaction.

    Swiping and gestures

    Korean smartphone manufacturer managed to reduce the kind of gesture tracking that was previously in living rooms with Sony EyeToy series of devices controlling a Sony Playstation of Microsoft Kinect into a smartphone handset.

    Pantech’s Vega LTE smartphone allowed control at a distance. This was based on technology from eyeSight to do gesture controls.

    Within applications, dating app Tinder created gestures that became ‘common language‘ – to swipe left as in reject an option. But the very gesture of swiping left was part of gamification as the tools are changing from working for us, to us working for them. They are no longer tools of personal liberation in terms of ideas and thinking.

    Digital drugs

    Captology to captured users

    To talk about how tools changed and became items of personal enslavement one has to back to the late 1990s. B.J. Fogg is a combination of media theorist and technologist with a doctorate in communications and heading a behavioural design lab at Stanford University.

    The insight that B.J. Fogg had was that with the right design cues, computers could become ‘charismatic’ in nature. They could manipulate behaviour. Professor Fogg converted his doctorate paper into a new discipline that he called ‘captology‘ ( from computers as persuasive techologies). By 2003, Fogg had realised that some of the methods had negative impacts on users. He flagged ethical use to his own students and in his book Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do.

    Unfortunately, a number of Fogg’s students and readers took these unethical tactics into Silicon Valley businesses and used them as ‘growth hacks’ for brands as diverse as Tinder (swipe right) and Robinhood the stock trading app that gamified transactions. This was the dark side of ‘move fast and break things’ mentality prevalent in Silicon Valley at the time.

    Other’s like Fogg’s student Tristan Harris saw what was happening and were horrified. Harris went on to co-found The Center for Humane Technology – an organisation raising awareness of the problems and holding the organisations to account.

    Addiction

    What was then termed internet addiction or video gaming addiction was by recognised as an issue by both the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Chinese government. As far back as 2006, China estimated the number of addicts in its country as numbering 2 million children and young adults.

    https://flic.kr/p/nrtZLm

    Psychoactive tools

    Modern technology didn’t bring a distortion of reality on their own. Regulation and media owners have a lot to do with it. The origin of the modern ‘filter bubble’ was said to be syndicated talk radio host Rush Limbaugh as media regulations were relaxed. This allowed media eco-systems to be created that catered to left wing or right wing views. There was no longer a common view, which people could hold different opinions over, but ‘the truth’ and ‘alternative facts’

    “You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts,”

    Kellyanne Conway quoted in The Atlantic magazine

    A combination of societal isolation, reductive algorithmic models, bad actors and dark pattern designs leave users more vulnerable in the online world. Machine learning and internet content allow for the creation of an overwhelming amount of content.

    Whole worlds can be created. This means that there is no social glue of common experiences. There is no consensus and technology enables the bar bell.

    Being boring

    So enough about digital drugs. Let’s back to something more boring. In the appropriately titled essay The Future is Boring by Eliane Glaser published by Monocle in its Monocle Companion Volume 2: 50 essays for a brighter future; the author discusses the pointless rituals of techno-capitalism. The reason for these pointless rituals is often that the tools are changing, providing useless digitally mediated services and access that is ultimately unfulfilling in both form and function.