Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity.

The guest room closet was getting clogged up with unused computer equipment. A 2009 iMac, a 2007 Apple Cinema Display. These things would have to be removed to get the luggage out for our trips. Truman delighted himself by hiding behind the equipment until we shut the door, then he’d climb up and knock something off the shelf to let us know he was trapped in the closet.

We’d then find him in there and he’d come running out with an innocent look on his face.

I decided to finally get rid of our excess computer equipment. Instead of putting it in the building’s recycling room I decided it needed to find a new home, so we donated the equipment to FreeGeek Chicago.

A while back I purchased a used laptop from this shop in the basement of storefront on Milwaukee and Diversy. I really like what they do; they take old computer equipment, make whatever they can functional by cleaning it up, making sure it works, and installing Linux Mint, and then sell the computers to breathe new life into old equipment. Instead of cluttering up landfills with older equipment that still has lots of life in it, FreeGeek finds new homes for this equipment. This helps save the environment, it reduces waste, and it spreads some Linux love around the area.

I really like this approach.

FreeGeek Chicago also refurbishes Apple computers and other devices and sells them for continued use. In addition, FreeGeek also offers educational services around the world of Linux and other open source software.

It’s a great organization and I hope to become a volunteer there one day. I hope the new owners of our iMac and Cinema Display enjoy them as much as I did.

At least they’re not sitting in a landfill.

I was flicking through my subscriptions list on my iPhone the other night when I said out loud to myself, “what in the blue blazes are you doing”? I realized I had way too many active subscriptions on my iCloud account and I was barely using most of them.

It was then that I realized that Apple was really smart when they got into the credit card game. By offering an Apple credit card, with promises of 3% cash back on purchases from Apple, it was just the little nudge that suckers like me needed to justify the purchase of yet another app or subscription from the Apple eco-system.

There’s a huge number of developers out there building beautiful apps that make our lives better. There’s no doubt about that. But there’s also a lot of crud available out there. And with this new paradigm of software where “you don’t own it, you just pay to use it”, pockets get emptied. Quickly.

Apple News+. US$9.99/month. Apple advertised a magazine browsing experience on your favorite iDevice that would transcend the likes of Harry Potter’s moving photos and paintings and Hogwarts. In reality, most of the magazines are PDFs of the printed copy and are chopped off at the bottom of the screen on my iPad.

Apple Music. “Hey Siri, turn on the buffet”, referring to the Philips Hue Light strip we have lighting up the dining room buffet. The response? “Sure, here’s Phoebe Buffay and the Hair Balls with ‘Smelly Cat'”. I ask Siri to play “some nice dinner music” from Apple Music and it plays Metallica. “Play some instrumental background music”. A woman immediately starts singing. Anything I want on Apple Music is more easily obtained from Spotify, which we already pay for.

iCloud. Apple now offers to storage plans that are on either side of what we need, either 200 GB (not enough) or 2 TB (approximately 2000 GB, way too much). It’s easier to just store my files on a hard drive in my office attached to a Raspberry Pi. And it’s probably more secure.

When we start heaping on the TV streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, CBS All Access, etc) to replace cable it ends up that it’d probably be cheaper to just get cable.

I’m all for developers and service providers getting the money they deserve, but at some point one has to choose what’s important and what’s extra frosting left on the spoon.

I’ve culled the subscriptions down substantially and I’m committed to sticking to a manifesto I wrote around software and hardware purchases, and determining which services deserve cash and which do not.

Let’s hope it’s a good first step to not wearing out my credit card.

Photo from TrekMovie.com

I know producers of science fiction movie and television like to make their production look at futuristic. One of the things I’ve always loved about the various incarnations of Star Trek, at least up until recently, was they depicted the future in a positive, hopeful way. Additionally, most of the time they also made the future tech seemingly achievable. How many times has someone from Apple mentioned they took an inspiration from Star Trek and came up with something like the iPad or the iPhone?

In Star Trek: The Next Generation and related series, we were introduced to the PADD, or Personal Access Display Device. While it looks a little clunky (think more along the lines of a modified Palm Pilot), it’s basically doing what your iPhone or Android device does today.

You hold it in your hands, you inter with it with your fingers or a stylus, and you carry it around with you.

The LCARS interfaces, or Library Computer Access and Retrieval System interfaces, allows the user to sit down and interact with a computer through a fully customizable touch interface. They’re built into walls, they’re built into consoles, and they’re built into desks in both vertical and horizontal orientation.

You know, much like an iPad or the upcoming Microsoft Neo.

Natural evolution of tech, especially the way we interact with technology, is awesome because we growth with it. We have adapted typewriter keyboards into the fastest way to input text into a computer. We develop touch interfaces so we can interact with the objects on the screen. We feel comfortable with using screens because our eyes allow us to focus on something as if we were reading a book. Our eyes have a target. We have something to look at.

A holographic project into mid-air does not give us something to focus on.

If you’re technically inclined and have a Mac (I don’t know if you can do this on windows), open a Terminal window. Go into Preferences and turn the opacity of your Terminal window down to 50%.

Now, start interacting through the keyboard interface. Type ‘ls’ a bunch of times and try reading the screen. Force your eyes to focus on the letters in the terminal window and do your best to ignore the rest of your desktop coming through behind the lists of files displayed in the window.

Fatiguing, isn’t it?

I know holograms looks all flashy and futurey and make some viewers go wow and make other graphic designers get all tingly in their nether regions, but the fact of the matter is, folks aren’t going to enjoy trying to focus on words and pictures floating in the air. Human eyes aren’t designed for that. And they’re sure not going to like swiping and grabbing and flailing thin air. Flapping around like a chicken to do a Google search is not on the short list of efficient interface design.

I like future technology depicted when it makes sense. The flailing and swiping made little sense in “Minority Report” (though it was cool to look at), and it certainly doesn’t belong in Star Trek’s 23rd or 24th centuries.

Do we see Wolf Blitzer still interacting with holograms on CNN? He did it for one presidential election and it never came back. They now wow us with magic boards that work most of the time.

We want the future. We want technology to grow and do amazing things and solve insolvable problems. We want to see the stars and we want to meet other sentient beings throughout the universe.

We don’t need to have floating holograms when a simple console with touch interface will suffice.

I didn’t really watch “The Honeymooners” until the mid 1980s. Back in the day it was shown in reruns on WPIX from New York at 11:30 PM, followed by the original “Star Trek”. After working second shift at a job, my boyfriend at the time and I would watch “The Honeymooners” and “Star Trek” before calling it a night. At the time, only the original 39 episodes were available; it would be a couple of years before Jackie Gleason found “The Lost Episodes” from kinescopes, it would be a little while after that where we could see the original sketches from Jackie Gleason’s Cavalcade of Stars.

While watching the original 39 episodes in perpetual rotation on WPIX, and having done so enough times to start knowing which episode was next and being able to recite lines, I mentioned to my boyfriend that Audrey Meadows wasn’t the original Alice. I don’t know how I knew this at the time; perhaps I had read it in a book or something. When asked who played the original Alice I barked out “Pert Kelton”. I didn’t really know who she was, I just knew the name and I knew she’d long been deceased at the time. You can’t help but bark her name when it’s nearly midnight, “Pert Kelton” just has a barky sound to it.

My boyfriend thought I was nuts (he never really got me anyway) and often scoffed off the useless knowledge in my head. A few months later from this revelation I went to the library and found a book that did indeed show Pert Kelton as the original Alice in “The Honeymooners” sketches on Jackie’s variety show. She was out because of the blacklisting during the McCarthy era. Audrey Meadows had her photo taken after just getting out of bed, all a mess in a frumpy dress, and Jackie gave Audrey the part.

I’ve seen a few clips of Pert playing Alice in various places on Youtube. Many of the comments talk about the bad actress playing Alice and how she’s too old and has such a nasally voice. In reality, Jackie thought Audrey Meadows was too young for the part, but she made herself look older.

From time to time I’ll watch interviews from the classier actors and actresses from a bygone era on Youtube, usually courtesy of the Foundation Interviews at the Emmy TV Legends website. An interview with Jayne Meadows talking about her sister Audrey and the role of Alice Kramden came up on my suggestion feed today, and Jayne tells how Audrey got the part of Alice and the comparison to Pert.

Imagine how much information I’d have rattling around in my head today if I had access to the Internet in the mid 1980s!

Since the first of the year I’ve been trying to take my work notes on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil. I’ve tried a couple of different apps designed for this, the stock Notes app, GoodNotes, OneNote, Notability and a couple of others. While they provided a good to very good note taking experience, I’ve never been satisfied with the result. Writing with an Apple Pencil is not as much like writing on paper with a great pen as it’s touted to be. And worse yet, organizing your notes and being able to find things a day or two later can be a bit of a challenge, especially if you’re not completely inside the Apple eco-system.

Prior to this iPad experiment I was using good, old-fashioned pen and paper. I have stacks of notebooks with all my work notes from over the years and the indexing system was by date and in my head. As I get older I find things are falling out of my head faster than they used to.

Enter Rocketbook.

I’ve talked about Rocketbook before. My husband and I discovered their product line a couple of years ago when they were on “Shark Tank”. Dressed in orange space suits, the co-founders of the company presented their plea for money from the sharks for a notebook that could be reused, simply by microwaving the notebook when it was full. Ink would magically disappear and you could use the notebook over again. The only caveat was you had to use a pen from the Pilot FriXion line. These pens use erasable ink.

The Rocketbook Wave was kind of nifty and I used it for a couple of cycles until I realized the pens made an impression in the paper, and even though the ink had disappeared, the impressions were everlasting. After two cycles through the notebook writing on a page was a bumpy experience.

Rocketbook now has the Rocketbook Everlast. This is a notebook that is erasable, but this time with a drop or two of water and a microfiber cloth. It’s like a notebook of mini-erase boards, but the cool thing is, using the FriXion pens, which now come in felt-tip marker-like instruments, there’s no impression. And, better yet, the ink sticks to the page after a couple of seconds and doesn’t smudge or wipe off like dry-erase markers. However, a couple of drops of water and that microfiber cloth and you can wipe the page clean and use it over again.

I’ve fallen in love with this approach.

The Rocketbook app lets you scan the pages and send them off to pre-determined destinations by marking icons at the bottom of each page. I have destinations in the company OneNote for team member notes, project notes, staff meeting notes, etc. And because it’s easy to sort and catalog notes, I can find things easily.

I’m really pleased with this system. They just started a Kickstarter campaign for a new product that involves templates and magnets holding pages in place and the like and I’m supporting their project.

I’m feeling more organized with this approach than I did with the Apple Pencil-iPad Pro system. I know it feels a little counterintuitive from my “technology is the answer for everything” mindset, but I’m really like writing my thoughts down, in my own handwriting, on a piece of paper, and filing it where I want it to be. There’s something memory-invoking about writing versus typing.

I’m feeling much more productive. And that’s always a good thing.

I realize that the evolution is technology is making it more difficult to manage all the things we have going on with our devices. However, when you’re writing your own software exclusively for your own hardware, and charging a premium to be part of that experience, this should not be possible. This is not an example of “It Just Works”.

This screenshot is from the latest version of iPad Pro running the latest version of iPadOS. If user interaction elements just disappeared like this on applications built and maintained by my team at work I’d be calling meetings and having frank discussions with quality control.

There’s a reason I am reevaluating who I invest my money with to maintain my realm of technology.