Airpods are the most comfortable bluetooth headphones I have tried. Over the winter months I tried earphones by Sony and other brands. After months of experimenting I came back to the airpods.
With the Sony WHR 1000 earpods there are a number of issues. The first is that noise cancelling changes noticeably. Several times I felt as if I had changed altitude because it switched from one sound environment to the next.
A popular refrain is that “the user is the product” when speaking of networks like Facebook and this refrain should not be valid. The user should be seen as the primary investor. We invest our time, we invest our social network and we invest our attention. We invest anything from minutes a day to hours a week and days per year. In such an environment the primary focus should be the value that Facebook provides to its users.
Mewe is like all other social networks were in their early days. In the early days it’s all about building a community, it’s all about privacy and it’s all about putting the user above commercial interests. Several years down the line they often shift towards trying to survive and even thrive if possible.
As I saw that Tim Berners Lee seems to support Mewe I decided to try the social network. It looks like every other social network and it seems to have a reasonable number of users. I skimmed through the groups and I noticed that “alternative” groups are more popular for now. I hope that this shifts towards being a community of people who prefer evidence based information.
Last weekend I watched hours worth of slow motion videos because I enjoy them. I also watched them because I was fighting one of the worst colds I’ve had in years. Slow motion videos are great because what is invisible to the eye, and hard to see in normal speed videos becomes boringly long when watched in slow motion.
An event that would have taken a few hundredths of a second now takes seconds or even minutes to occur. We’re familiar with the photos of bullets going through apples from our childhood and we’re familiar with the footage of slow motion rocket launches but have you seen the saturn five launch where just the ignition sequence takes sixteen minutes?
When we first joined Facebook it was filled with chronological timelines kept active by university friends. At that time algorithms did not affect what we saw or how frequently and there was a sense of community. In the last two or three weeks we have heard a lot about Cambridge Analytica and other companies because they have siphoned off user data and used it to manipulate people in a number of political events.
A few months ago, before the winter months came I was happilly flying the drone up to four times a day. At the time I was running their old app and it worked flawlessly. You turned on the remote, turned on the drone and then you connected to the wifi hotpot and within 30 seconds you could be flying.
At some point in November the cheeky people designing the app decided to “simplify” everything with QR codes which is theoretically fantastic. In practice this locks you out from your own device. The remote and the drone work fine and I can fly the drone without a video display or telemetry and I can connect the phone to the wifi hotspot of the remote.
At the beginning of the year I said that I would prioritise book reading over Social Media because I feel that the disconnect between reader and audience has grown to such an extent that you benefit more from reading books than Facebook and Twitter Timelines.
Abandon : A book about a mining town whose inhabitants disappeared from one day to the next.
Snowbound: About a father and daughter who end up travelling a big distance
Earlier this week Google decided that it would shift from subsidising narrowcasting content makers to favouring “broadcasters”. This was demonstrated with their shift towards rewarding content creators with higher requirements. In order to be a youtube partner, you need people to have viewed 4000hrs worth of content and have over 1000 subscribers.
A few years ago when you browsed Youtube you would easily browse through hundreds of videos before finding content worth watching. You would then browse and find more content. It was organic.
The Gutenburg Press Plugin provides a new way to write blog posts. Rather than write as if a blog post was a single block of text it breaks it up into segments or “presses”
A few weeks ago a Gutenburg Press was brought to the Palais wilson and we had the opportunity to experiment with printing our own Universal Declaration of Human rights as part of the UDHR 70 event. In Gutenberg’s day you would have to typeset every letter character by character but for the sake of speed we just had two slates as you see above. One version was in French and the second one was in English. It made duplicating a single page instant.
The Hubsan Nano Q4 H111 drone is a tiny drone. It is not much more than a flying circuit board with four engines, a battery and a cowling. It is very light and fits easily on the screen of an iphone SE, along with it’s controller. Such a small drone requires practice to fly properly. This is because there are no flight assists. When you take off you need to apply just the right amount of thrust to hover and you need to make small adjustments to keep it from drifting. With practice you gain control of the quadcopter.