TODO: Blog Idea – KelsonV Social Posts

Locked In

The last couple of years have really broken my suspension of belief for Scalzi’s “Lock In.”

Brain-interface full VR internet and remotely-pilotable robot bodies for people who suffer from lock-in syndrome? Sure!

A massive effort to actually accommodate people caught up in a mass disabling event?

Of course the wrangling to preserve those accommodations, the disparity between those who can afford a good VR environment and IRL caretakers vs. the ones who only afford a low-resolution home that shows them advertisements through their brain interface, etc. are still all too believable.

Markdown Mail

(replying to a complaint about HTML Email)

Personally I think something like basic* Markdown would have worked out better: just enough formatting to be useful, while still keeping it fully responsive to different displays, safer to include in web apps, easy on bandwidth and human-readable in text-only clients.

A lot of that syntax was around as informal conventions in newsgroups and plaintext email, and we would’ve been better off if it had been standardized instead of just plugging in the full web renderer. Though that’s still better than Outlook using Word to render formatted mail.

* Inline formatting, headings, quotes, maaaaybe links. Not any of the extended syntax for tables or anything that introduces layout or breaks readability.

Contemplating adding the etymology…

Contemplating adding the etymology for a bunch of streets that are clearly named after rich American industrialists of the 19th and early 20th centuries (Carnegie, Vanderbilt, etc.), but remembering the computer lab in college where we allegedly named the servers after four Renaissance artists. Perhaps it’s best to confirm that there isn’t another pattern at work.

Rats

Or maybe mice, or squirrels.

In any case, you don’t want them in your car, chewing on the wiring.

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Fortunately they only actually chewed through the control wires for the high beams. Still going to be expensive to fix (and of course acts of rodent aren’t covered by warranty).

Going to need to inspect the garage, though, in case that’s where they came from.

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We spent a chunk of the afternoon cleaning out the garage. Apparently something got into our backup emergency food and water and was trying to make nests out of bits of old stuffed animals. And silica gel. And old unbuilt model kits.

Katie’s going to do a second round of bleaching on the floor while I go pick up the car. And tomorrow we tackle the upper storage compartment, just in case the reason we didn’t find any actual rodents is that they’re up there.

And then get the bikes and everything that wasn’t contaminated or can be disinfected back in before it rains this weekend.

A lot of cloud-based, client-server applications really should be client applications with some kind of sync solution.I don…

A lot of cloud-based, client-server applications really should be client applications with some kind of sync solution.

I don’t need my shopping list to be reachable at any time from anywhere in the world. I need it to be on a handful of phones and maybe a laptop/desktop, and for changes on one device to show up on the others. That can be done with a web-based application, or a mobile app with its own backend. It can send updates halfway across the country to a dedicated central server so they can come back and reach the family member who’s at the store right now…

…but it can also be done by syncing changes peer-to-peer, or via a cloud-based relay, or building on a more general sync service like Dropbox or Nextcloud.

The web and cloud services have made the client-server model really easy to build for. As long as you know the client is always going to have a good network connection.

(Flashback to grocery shopping before they installed a new cell tower near the supermarket and we couldn’t even text each other “hey, I just remembered we need ___!” unless the one shopping was at the front of the store where the signal was just strong enough that an SMS message might show up. Obviously this would delay syncing too, but it’s another reason to keep a copy of the current data locally on the device.)

A related example where client-server makes more sense: actual shopping (whether arranging store pickup or buying something to be shipped). You need to know what’s available, what’s in stock, what the prices are…and so do all the store’s other customers.

The model for how people use it is a star: one central point (the store) and a bunch of rays connecting to it (the customers) and not to each other – so it matches a client-server structure.

Compared to the shopping list, where it might be built as a star, with the central server running it and lots of people connecting to it, but the actual use model is a small mesh: A handful of people and their devices sharing something among themselves.

There are two main types of cell phone buyers

Intriguing insight in this review of the Fairphone 5:

There are two main types of cell phone buyers – those who love checking out the new gadgets and getting a new phone, and those who “hate saying goodbye” to their old devices, who would rather not replace a phone for mere planned obsolescence because it still works *just fine* except for this one little thing that either can be worked around or *should* be fixable.

Fairphone is intended for the second group

https://www.theverge.com/23895548/fairphone-5-review-price-features