One of the biggest problems that I have with new technology doodads is that I’m not very practical about acquiring them (see the small mountain of Wear OS watches I have in a box for a testimonial to that proclivity) and tend towards the stupid setting when it comes to acquisition lust. Strangely, despite this tendency, I avoid most Apple hardware entirely these days if only because I am freaked out by the walled garden approach so most of the super pricey and useless geegaws are off menu for me. The limited possibilities of the usefulness of any of their devices always leaves me cold.
I’m also no longer a tremendous fan of manually building too many components of functionally attractive gadgets. As I said yesterday, I’m just now purchasing my first Raspberry Pi ever. I also tend to avoid especially ambitious and gadgety Kickstarter campaigns because I know I’m going to be disappointed and/or frustrated by the results. This is largely due to being lazy.
That laziness, however, really, really makes me wish that things like the reMarkable 2 were a little
lot less expensive. I absolutely love the idea of having a large drawing surface with a paper analog feel. It sounds like the invention that I’ve been waiting for since my first computer (that was 1996, by the way, and I wasn’t already in the twenties) and having a glimpse of the possibilities that potentially lay ahead. The reviews from The Verge, Engadget, and a few others only increase my want for this incredibly limited but equally awesome device. There are a number of very appealing parts to this tablet: it’s running Linux, it has a textured screen to approximate the feeling of drawing on paper, and a few other factors but the price is what always empties my cart: $400 for E Ink is a tough sell for me. That said, I really enjoy all of the E Ink devices that I already have but I have a feeling that I’m going to wait for a (relatively) inexpensive, refurbished version of this or I’m eventually going to bite a bit harder on one of the Boox devices that I’ve been eying for a while. Some of those despite being Android devices have similar capabilities and, on the lower end of their product line, are sold at a price that doesn’t make me wince when I contemplate dropping that many dollars on what is really only going to be a drawing device for me. I do want but I know I can’t. That is not a pleasant place for me to linger.
Category: The Dollar Dances On Our Asses
I am generally opposed to invasive advertising and not for the reasons that you might suspect. Like Doc Searls, I believe that news organizations have the right to generate money to pay their bills and all of the usual justifications and if the aforementioned media outlets don’t try to draw me into some horrific listicle/slideshow layered in trashy js or attempt to hijack every cookie in my browser then I’m okay with letting that stuff load. If you don’t actively interfere with my ability to read text then I don’t get upset at you. I am getting tired to the excessive attempts to get me to subscribe to the dead letter version of a publication in order to read more than excerpts online or the siren call of logging in with another authentication network so the page can reload without delivering the thing I actually came to the site to read. I love Doc’s savage and apt characterization of that variety of advertising:
Tracking-based ads, generally called adtech, do not sponsor publications. They use publications as holding pens in which human cattle can be injected with uninvited and unwelcome tracking files (generally called cookies) so their tracked eyeballs can be shot, wherever they might show up, with ads aimed by whatever surveillance data has been gleaned from those eyeballs’ travels about the Net.
It sums up very concisely the feeling that you get when you realize that as meaningless as the website that its advertising is hosted on is to the ad networks and that they’re only interested in the dim and distant possibility that you might click on one of their advertisements accidentally which will then tally a meaningless click that will eventually demand payment.
Long winded and vindictive as all of the above might be towards being annoyed and inconvenienced by much of the methodology twiddled over above, that brand of advertising which is rapidly becoming (already is?) the predominant source of advertising revenue is completely ineffectual. It’s a shell game where the potential reader, the publisher, and the entity trying to actually get the word out about something they’re selling are all being ripped off and categorized in the most meaningless and superficial way. In the interest of avoiding participation in this circus of stupid I’ve stopped reading or linking to WaPo or the NYT because they aren’t interested in returning readers but a few potential pennies from a herded set of eyeballs. It just makes the experience of trying to read important bits of journalism feel like you’re being hard sold by a carnival barker. I’m more than finished feeling that degree of condescension without wanting to lash out at the source of it. I’m a nonparticipant in it not because I feel like I’m going to fundamentally change anything by removing a ghostly pixel of demographic from the sea of other poorly categorized junk data but because I don’t want to have anything to do with any part of it. It’s the same reason that I’m vegan: I’m not going to change a damn thing but I do not want to be part of any of it.
Man, this autopsy on the last great internet breakage was definitely a breath of fresh air when it comes to public disclosure of mistakes companies with thumbs in a great deal of interwebs infrastructure have made. Again, like most of the major outages (remember the S3 one a few years ago?) it came down to a single mistake that cascaded out to wreak havoc and, at least in this write up, the person responsible wasn’t thrown under any buses because regular expressions are hard and difficult to test definitively in many cases. This also reminds me of how easy it is to break many things at great speed when you have a pile of automation in your stack and that automation not only doesn’t fix everything but can make small issues global pretty quickly.
Anyway, it was nice to see a comprehensive write up of what happened that didn’t lay blame on any individual human or service. Reading this also made me clench with fear since I have the opportunity to make mistakes like this, albeit nowhere near the scale of this one, all the time and often under pressure.