Rubenerd

I got another of these increasingly popular feedback emails that ask you to rate a product or experience on an integer scale, this time from a prominent server hardware manufacturer.

These are problematic for many reasons, especially when you spam a page directly with them when you’re trying to work. I empathise companies need a lower-friction feedback mechanism that more of their clients will use, but these feedback scales feel like a blunt instrument.

Today I learned another, perhaps far more counterproductive reason they have problems. Companies understandably not only use different scales, they order them differently. Take the example I got this morning:

How likely are you to recommend $VENDOR $DEVICE?
Extremely Likely 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 Not Likely

And then another one I got last week for a website:

How likely are you to use $WEBSITE for new projects?
Not likely 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Very Likely

If you weren’t paying too close attention and thought you hit the number in the same vague position, you could be saying one company is great, and another sucks! I wonder how many of their metrics are skewed because of this?

I’ve been keenly following the Brexit news from the tenuously-titled United Kingdom. The geopolitical and economic ramifications from it will be huge, and I don’t think the press outside Europe appreciate it.

The fantastic image above was by calydeon on pixabay.

Regardless of Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn’s opinions, there’s growing pressure for another Brexit vote. The public were lied to the first time, most transparently that their tax dollars would instead fund the National Health Service. The Leave.EU campaign broke electoral laws during the referendum, and others are under investigation. Sun readers are even realising restricting borders to others will be restricting themselves too.

A vote with an informed populace and no dishonest shenanigans this time seems reasonable; necessary even.

The pro-Brexit crowd is understandably against it, for two reasons. They know public sentiment has shifted. But the most common retort I’ve seen is that it will undermine democracy by calling referendums until the elites they get the answer they want. I’d posit democracy was already undermined with promises even the UKIP retracted within an hour of the referendum results.

Maybe honesty in elections is only something international observers should chastise developing countries for.

But even leaving those misplaced concerns aside, what do they have to fear by another vote if their case is still strong? Surely the stellar performance of Her Majesty’s Government during these negotiations informs nothing but confidence.

It’s also a tad on the nose taking democratic talking points from a group so angry that New Year London was awash in European Union colours. Either they forgot, or they were happy being hypocrites given London voted to remain.

My favourite pet theory is Brexit was decided in secret between Theresa May, Sinn Féin, and the Scottish National Party to reunite Ireland and grant Scottish independence without England losing face. Because to all but the most ardent ostriches meeting sand, that’s the clear Brexit end game.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to read about international companies and jobs leaving the United Kingdom for the mainland to keep their headquarters in the Union, and for a semblance of stability.

Ben Weir reported on the Church of Scientology for the Sydney Morning Herald, quoting a recent defector:

“Australian recruits have dwindled to virtually zero as media coverage and access to the Internet has ensured the truth about the cult is well-known here” Mr Schofield said.

Good!

It’s also a relief to see the Internet being used to disseminate truth, especially with all the conspiracy theories and alternative facts swaying public opinion and policy, right up to Prime Ministers and Presidents. I get so jaded with that dull, pandering nonsense I forget about the Internet’s capacity for good.

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03:19:56 – Every unreleased episode from Q4 2018 in one stitched package! Topics include Sydney Trains, TECHNOBOYS PULCRAFT GREEN-FUND, Honda San, Singapore, flowers, rampling, cicadas, apparently unmanly things, studying, podcast elitism, indie media, late night Mascot, continents, construction, soulless glass boxes, Wikipedia, marketing language, dearth of power points, ocean liners, promises, selling an iMac, making coffee, email, the next leap for computing, Tiger Balm, and sneezes. Best to avoid listening to this all at once!

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released January 2019 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

I did a back of envelope calculation in December 2016, and was surprised to find Firefox was smaller than Chrome that I kept around for testing. Not a bit smaller, half the size.

These were the original results:

$ du -sh /Applications/Firefox.app/
==> 189M    /Applications/Firefox.app/
$ du -sh /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/
==> 366M    /Applications/Google Chrome.app/

I ran it again today:

$ du -sh /Applications/Firefox.app/
==> 179M	/Applications/Firefox.app/
$ du -sh /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/    
==> du: /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/: No such file or directory

Oh yeah, I got rid of the latter entirely. Still, Firefox is even smaller now.

Clara shared ufotable’s Twitter account with me this afternoon. They’ve understandably been heavily spruiking the second Heavens Feel movie starring everyone’s favourite purple haired character.

Cute! And I see what they did there.

Those were pretty, but next month’s NewType is amazing.

I was about to say they’re making me question my decade-long Tohsaka allegiance, but then they posted this and I promptly fell back into line.

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18:11 – The unpublished 2018 spectacular, broken headphones and keyboards and floppy drives and internet quotas and stomachs, social networks turning people into arseholes, Marie Kondo, archiving websites you care about, supplanting Facebook, and the Red Hat FTP archive.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released January 2019 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

The Pet Shop Boys, “A Face Like That”, from their 2012 album Elysium:

A tropical storm was passing through;
And so were you.

Sam Biddle wrote this article for The Intercept about a brand of Internet-enabled video doorbell. You can probably guess what comes next.

Ring has a history of lax, sloppy oversight when it comes to deciding who has access to some of the most precious, intimate data belonging to any person: a live, high-definition feed from around — and perhaps inside — their house.

I wasn’t aware of other issues they’ve had, but if true I don’t like where this is going.

Beginning in 2016, according to one source, Ring provided its [redacted]-based research and development team virtually unfettered access to a folder on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world.

At the same time, the source said, Ring unnecessarily provided executives and engineers in the U.S. with highly privileged access to the company’s technical support video portal

I redacted the location of the researches because its irrelevant to the story and plays into prejudices. I also treat the details in news stories with anonymous sources with a dose of skepticism; Ring did provide a statement, but nothing specific.

I’ll reserve judgement on this device specifically, but what’s being reported here is utterly believable.

Every time a new smart home device comes out, I think it’d be great. Then I wonder how they’d mess it up maliciously or accidentally. Friends and podcasters discuss how awesome their lives are with their new smart device, and I sit at home using light switches like a schmuck. Then things like this happen. And worst of all, I’m not even happy I’m right each time.

The IoT industry as a whole has not earned your trust. Please consider this before jumping onto the next of these.

I mentioned the European Space Agency in my Chrysler Building post because I found out today they have a web store. It’s one of those outsourced, print to order places, but they still have some cool stuff.

The Sailor Moon franchise made me a Mercury fan, but I think the ESA’s Neptune hoodie design is the best. As most obviously with the Saturn design, it has circles for each of its rings. What a brilliant visualisation.

Below are Sailor Neptune and the hoodie, in an order I’d hope you’d be able to discern.