Month: March 2016

Are you in terrible shape? Not so terrible but bad enough shape? Do you need help? Here you go

Like most people — for instance, me — , you may need to get in better shape. In doing some research on it, I came across the following links that I found interesting, inspiring, and useful. I hope you do too:

Why metadata matters, and what it says about you.

You may hear people talk about metadata. Essentially it is the data wrapped around data. Look at it this way: if you use your cell phone to take a photo, the image itself is the data. Your cell phone also has other data about the photo, such as where it was taken, when, what device took it, among other information and it is that data that is the metadata.

Why metadata is important is strikingly illustrated in this effort:  Pathways Project. Pathways….
In the about section

…is a creative data project showing a month’s worth of geolocation data and message metadata collected from the mobile phones of Londoners. The aim of Pathways is to show what digital data looks like in the context of common relationships. Each of us is intimately and invisibly connected to the data we create, and as the number of internet-enabled devices increases, so does the amount of data generated. This is the reality within which Pathways is situated.

All participants willingly volunteered their data; data was retained solely for the duration of the project. Participants were found through a combination of in-person recruitment and email open calls.

Pathways was created by data researcher and artist Mimi Onuoha as part of the 2014-15 Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship. To learn more about the development process and the themes that inspired the project, see the project posts on National Geographic’s blog. To learn more about Mimi and her work, visit her personal website or follow her on Twitter.

You really should visit the Pathways Project to see how your life is measurable via metadata.

Some thoughts I had after viewing it:

  • Your metadata represents you, like an outline, or your shadow. It is not every detail about you, just like a certain outline or certain clothing doesn’t describe all of you. But it does describe alot about you.
  • Your destinations have purposes, and from these destinations, people can tell something about you. Few of us wander about randomly.
  • You can be tracked indirectly from others you interact with.
  • Your life is based on commitments, and those commitments can be determined from your metadata.
  • The best way to avoid tracking and inferences is to be unpredictable and uncommitted. Unpredictability increases entropy. It makes it harder to codify you.

A very cool Ikea Billy Bookshelves Hack

Over at themakerista.com is a very cool hack of 3 Billy bookcases that result in something with a built in look. Here’s the work in progress:
And here’s the final product:

You may not try something as challenging, but if you are interested in spiffing up your tired old bookcases, check this out this: The Makerista: Laura’s Living Room: Ikea Billy Bookshelves Hack

With the new announcements, Apple reinforces their affordable line of products


Apple took a turn towards something I was hoping they would do: (relative) affordability. You can see it in this piece from  Business Insider:

Apple introduced an iPhone with a smaller screen on Monday called the iPhone SE. The best way to think about it is as Apple’s current top-of-the-line iPhone specs in a smaller body. It costs $399 without a contract — a surprisingly low price for a new iPhone. …the older iPad Air 2 got a price cut to $399…. While the Apple Watch didn’t get a hardware update, Apple did unveil new nylon bands and cut its starting price from $350 to $299.

I was wondering if Apple was going to try and offer some affordable products or reposition itself as a luxury brand. I am glad to see they went with affordable. There are now lots of products from Apple at a wide range of price points, starting with the iPod (at $59). I have always been a fan of the lower priced iPods, and I am glad to see Apple still offers them. Likewise, the iPad Mini 2 is an excellent tablet and the iMac mini is an excellent computer. Relative to the market, they are priced competitively and yet superior technology. Now the new Watch and the new SE phone join them.

For people who want to spend lots of money, Apple has a product for them. By offering the lower end products, they both force their competitors to offer better products as well as allow more people to have access to their excellent technology.

P.S. I realize for some people, even these relatively low prices are not affordable. In the context of this post, affordable is in context to the rest of the marketplace an Apple product competes within.

Is it worthwhile buying a slow cooker?


Short answer: it depends. According to this, Is it worthwhile buying a slow cooker?, slow cooked food tastes better and looks better, though the food in a slow cooker ends up being more moist. Go with an oven if you can  attend to it. Go with a slow cooker if you want to have a minimal cooking process going all day that doesn’t require you to do much more than to load up the cooker and go. An additional consideration: a slow cooker uses very little power. Go with a slow cooker if you want to minimize energy use.

Read the article and see what you think. And if you like the idea of slow cooker recipes but slow cookers aren’t for you, read it and get some ideas on how to use your oven to slow cook instead.

(Image via Wikimedia)

The problem with AI, Bots and social networks

Bots combined with AI and social networks are going to become an increasing problem. I thought of this when reading about the relatively recent Ashley Madison fiasco. Even if you wouldn’t be caught dead using such a service, this applies to you in other ways.

One of the fascinating aspects of Ashley Madison was just how many bots were employed by the company, at least according to this article: Ashley Madison Code Shows More Women, and More Bots. 

How many? Alot! From the article:

After searching through the Ashley Madison database and private email last week, I reported that there might be roughly 12,000 real women active on Ashley Madison. Now, after looking at the company’s source code, it’s clear that I arrived at that low number based in part on a misunderstanding of the evidence. Equally clear is new evidence that Ashley Madison created more than 70,000 female bots to send male users millions of fake messages, hoping to create the illusion of a vast playland of available women.

Here’s some examples:

This matters to you because chances are you will be interacting more and more with bots. Bots are cheap, and companies and organizations are going to go with them to meet their needs and yours.  Maybe the bots will be harmless, like customer service reps that are actually just software programs. However it is also possible, just like it was at Ashley Madison, that these bots will be customized to con you into thinking you are dealing with a real person so that you will give them more money in some form or another. Bots may be obvious now, but as AI improves, so will the ability of bots to fool you. It’s not inconceivable that we will spend more and more time interacting with software that we think is human. It is something we need to think about and talk to fellow humans — and not AI driven bots — about how it will affect us and if it is negative, what we are going to do about it.

Robots in the real world may not realistically resemble humans for a very long time. Online bots that realistically resemble humans will get there much sooner.  We need to quickly anticipate what positive and negative effects that will have and prepare for that.

Twitter: a former bar you used to love and now visit nostalgically

I’ve likely said enough about twitter. So much so, that there doesn’t seem much else to say. I wanted to highlight this comic, though (the long, slow death of Twitter | Technology | The Guardian) because it wonderfully sums up the arc of Twitter over the years. It matches my thoughts and feelings about the platform very well.

I still come to Twitter, the way you go to a bar you used to love. There’s not as many friends there as there was before, but there are still some. It becomes as much a visit to experience nostalgia as anything else. But then the shouters and the fighters show up and you remember why you lost your interest in it.

A better way to follow the US presidential race…

..is to follow this, from Bloomberg:  Who’s Winning the Presidential Delegate Count?

You can still read the news and follow along, state by state, but what really matters more and more is the delegate count.

One thing that surprised me: right now, Ted Cruz is alot closer to Donald Trump than I imagined. Obviously there is a way to go still, but he is doing well. Will Cruz win? I think the odds are against him, but right now they are not insurmountable.

As for the other side, I believe Hillary Clinton is going to win, regardless of the Michigan surprise showing of Bernie Sanders. Sanders is performing better than many imagined, but she has a big lead in delegates and that will only get larger as we go along.

How to Create Tarball & Compress to GZip Under Windows (.tar.gz) and why you should

If you are not familiar with Unix, then you might wonder why you would want to create tarballs and then gzip them. Recently I had a directory that was over 12 GB in size and I wanted to zip it up and send it to someone. By creating a tarball from it and then gzipping it, I was able to shrink it down to under 5 GB. That made it alot easier to send to the person.

Another reason to do this is you want to send a file from Windows to Unix. By compressing the file this way, you can be sure that the Unix user can uncompress it in a straightforward way.

For more on this, see:  How to Create Tarball & Compress to GZip Under Windows (.tar.gz) | Gettin’ Geek