Two more big steps in de-Googling

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Over the last year I’ve taken a lot of little steps to de-Google my life. I won’t be able to escape Google completely for a long time, but some little shifts have been helpful. So far, it’s been three main things:

In the past few weeks, I’ve just made two more big shifts.

Google TV –> Roku

This was a pretty easy change to make. I’ve been needing to update our Google TV (Chromecast) devices for a while now, so instead of getting newer devices from Google we purchased some Roku Ultra players to use in the house.

Setting them up is always a bit of a pain (logging in to all of those streaming apps again), but they’ve ultimately worked out great!

Android –> iPhone

The biggest shift for me was moving back to iPhone again. While Apple is still a huge company that shouldn’t be trusted too much, they are much more privacy and user-focused than the other big tech firms (Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta). In recent weeks, two things happened that pushed me a bit more toward Apple and it was finally time to make the leap.

Google’s isn’t as bad as it seems, and Apple’s isn’t as good as it seems, but both are nudges to push me further from Google and more toward Apple, so I made the move.

I won’t bore you with all of the pros and cons of Android versus iPhone, but here is a bit of what I’ve found.

  • The Apple Messages app is fine, but without a Macbook (I’m still using Windows), it’s not as helpful. In fact, it’s a bit worse for me because I can no longer get my text messages inside of Beeper (though Beeper is still an amazing app).
  • The Pixel Watch was great, but the Apple Watch is far superior. Better experience, more features, smoother performance.
  • The lack of a folding device is a bummer (I’ve had the last two Pixel Fold devices), but it’s not a huge deal. The ability to unfold was nice for reading if I didn’t have my Kindle and for browsing large photos, but there wasn’t a whole lot beyond that.
  • The AirPods Pro aren’t as good as the Pixel Buds Pro, largely for the ability to tap them. Apple’s require a more focused and firm touch to change songs, pause, adjust volume, etc, whereas Google’s would respond to any glancing touch as if by magic.
  • iPhone’s homescreen use, particularly for badges and widgets, is much smoother than Android.
  • In the car, Android Auto has a notable better user experience than Apple CarPlay, though they’re quite similar.
  • Everything else it the same. App parity is real, and 99% of my apps are indistinguishable from their Android counterparts.

All in all, I’m pleased with both moves and I feel good about giving Google a bit less money and personal information. Neither Roku or iPhone is perfect, but they’re at least as good as what I had before.

I’ll continue to work to whittle out Google services from my life. Next on the chopping block is likely YouTube TV, but other tools (such as Google Workspace for our business) are unlikely to get touched for years. We’ll see.

Have you de-Googled much lately? What moves have you made?

The Miyoo Mini Plus

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I recently turned 49 years old, and for my birthday my wife got me a gift (as suggested by Robert) that a 9-year-old would love — the Miyoo Mini Plus. It’s fantastic.

In short, it’s a handheld video game system (not unlike a Game Boy), and it has the ability to play virtually all of the video games from the past. It takes some work to get it set up, as it doesn’t come with any games preloaded, but once it’s set it’s a fantastic little device.

You can’t tell from the photo above, but the screen fills virtually all of the space at the top, with very small bezels. It’s a small device, but they make great use of the space. Here’s a photo with a game loaded so you can see how well they utilize the space at the top.

As I mentioned above, it takes a bit of work to get things set up. It’s not particularly difficult, but it’ll take an hour or two to get it set up like I have it. In my case, I’ve loaded it up with games from the Nintendo Game Boy, the NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Gear, PlayStation, and a few others. I literally have thousands of games in there. The battery (charged via USB-C) will last about 7 hours, and it all runs very smoothly.

This video is an excellent walk-through on how to load everything up:

It’s not a perfect device, but for just over $60 it’s an incredible deal. Offhand, I can’t think of another electronic device for $60 that has nearly this kind of value. If you’re into retro gaming at all, I encourage you to check it out.

Fear versus regret

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The concept of regret is an interesting one. Most thoughts around regret simply say “avoid it”. Do the thing now so you don’t regret it later. For example, in Seth Godin’s book “Linchpin” he says:

“There’s a popular brand of clothing with a huge slogan plastered on it: NO FEAR. I think this motto is either disingenuous or stupid. Of course you should have fear. Riding a bike without a helmet may be fearless, but it’s not smart. Lava surfing might be fearless, but it’s not smart. Swallowing fire without training might be fearless as well, but we can all agree it’s not smart either. So what’s smart? Living life without regret.”

So he’s saying that fear can be wise, but regret is problematic.

On the other side you have Daniel Pink’s popular book “The Power of Regret“, where he shares the benefits that regret can bring to your life. Specifically, he says:

Regret is not dangerous or abnormal, a deviation from the steady path to happiness. It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human. Regret is also valuable. It clarifies. It instructs. Done right, it needn’t drag us down; it can lift us up.

The purpose of this book is to reclaim regret as an indispensable emotion—and to show you how to use its many strengths to make better decisions, perform better at work and school, and bring greater meaning to your life.

So which is it? Is regret a good thing or a bad thing?

Generally speaking, I agree with Godin that regret is something to avoid if we can. Pink’s point is that if something goes poorly and you regret it, don’t run from that emotion. In fact, people that don’t feel regret at all may have something chemically wrong with them. Again, from his book:

However, one group didn’t feel any worse when they discovered that a different choice would have produced a better outcome: people with lesions on a part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex. “They seem to experience no regret whatsoever,” neuroscientist Nathalie Camille and her colleagues wrote in the journal Science. “These patients fail to grasp this concept.” In other words, the inability to feel regret—in some sense, the apotheosis of what the “no regrets” philosophy encourages—wasn’t an advantage. It was a sign of brain damage.

Live life in such a way that you work to avoid regret, but don’t ignore any regret in your past as it can teach you some amazing lessons to improve things going forward.

First Encounters is Wii Sports

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When the Nintendo Wii was released back in 2006 it came with the famous game “Wii Sports” included. Wii Sports was intended to essentially be a tech demo to show users how the new control system worked and give them something to play with as they worked their way into the “real” games.

If you were around at the time, you know that Wii Sports turned into something bigger than even Nintendo could have dreamed of. Even though it was simple, it was addictingly fun and people played it for years.

The new Meta Quest 3 virtual reality headset comes with a free game built-in, and it has the same goal as Wii Sports — to introduce people to a new way to play games. While it almost certainly won’t have the lasting appeal of Wii Sports, the new “First Encounters” game on the Quest 3 is much more than just a tech demo.

Augmented Reality

The Quest headsets have always been about Virtual Reality (VR), but the Quest 3 is also pushing the Augmented Reality (AR) features quite a bit. While VR whisks you away to a new world, AR keeps you in your room and then augments it with a game to be played in your space. First Encounters is a fantastic way to introduce this to new players.

First Encounters is a short game (perhaps five minutes) where space aliens break into your room and you need to capture them. As they break in, you’ll see debris landing on your floor (and elevated surfaces like your couch and countertops) and they’ll create holes in your walls to see the outside world. Here’s a video of a guy playing it (slight language warning) to see what I mean:

Like Wii Sports, it’s a great way to learn how the new technology in a fun way, and it tracks your score so you can compete against others. It really just has the one game (and it’s single player), so it won’t have nearly the replayability of Wii Sports, but it’s a mind-blowing experience the first time you try it and will have more lasting appeal than Meta planned for it to have.

Storytelling could have saved Google Stadia

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Yesterday, Google announced that they were shutting down Google Stadia. While I was a big fan of the service, the announcement didn’t surprise me very much, as Stadia just never really caught on. If you’re asking “What was Stadia?”, that pretty much explains what happened.

If you saw Google’s official Stadia launch trailer a few years ago, seen here, it probably didn’t help your understanding at all:

After watching that video, you probably have very little idea what Stadia really did. Rather than that two-minute bit of craziness, a simple message would have done much better. Something like:

“Not that long ago, if you wanted to watch a movie at home, you needed a DVD or Blu-ray player, but then Netflix streaming came along and let you just use whatever device you had to stream the movies directly to you.

Similarly, most video games systems like PlayStation and Xbox need a console next to your TV to power the games. Stadia is more like Netflix for video games. As you’re playing the game, Google handles the hard work and just streams the game to whatever device you happen to be on, whether that’s a laptop, tablet, phone, or Chromecast-enabled TV. There are no downloads, no consoles, no updates — just start streaming your games instantly on the devices that you already have.”

I even made a short video a few years ago showing Stadia running a hot new game on an ancient Chromebook that we had, and it ran wonderfully:

The problem is that Google’s messaging was unclear and people just didn’t understand. Even yesterday when it was announced, a very tech-savvy (and video game playing) friend of mine said “What was it, really? It streamed or something? How did it work?“. He had no idea, and he was their target demographic.

Back in 2019 when it first came out, I heard tech podcasts talking about it with statements like “Google has a new video game system, so that’s one more device you’ll need to put next to your TV“. That wasn’t accurate at all, but it wasn’t the fault of the podcast — Google just wasn’t clear.

Storytelling and messaging are vitally important for every business. If you can’t make it clear what you’re offering and how it’ll improve someone’s life, you’ll lose their attention almost immediately. When we build websites, messaging strategy isn’t optional — a beautiful website with poor messaging is destined to fail.

Video game streaming is still a fantastic thing and should continue to grow, with services like Amazon Luna, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and PlayStation Plus streaming, but Google had arguably the best tech and yet they’re the first ones out.

We’ll never know for sure, but I fully believe that better messaging could have made a big difference for Google.

What’s helping Fortnite stick around?

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Fortnite has been one of the most popular video game titles for the past few years, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. My daughter got me into it about a year ago, and I play a quick game with her or with some of my other friends fairly often. Games generally last less than 20 minutes, so it’s good way to have a quick bit of fun.

If you’re not familiar with Fortnite, it’s essentially just a 100-person fight to the death. You all jump out of a flying bus and skydive onto an island that’s roughly two square miles, start fighting, and the last person alive wins — and then you start over and do it again.

It’s a simple concept, but I think Epic has done a few brilliant things to help it succeed.

Cartoons

The style of the game is rather cartoony, with no blood and no real deaths (when someone “dies”, they just evaporate and fly off to play another game). You’re still running around with guns shooting each other, so it’s not exactly free of violence, but they’ve done a nice job of keeping it relatively clean.

Free

There is no cost to play. You can download it for free, and play it for free forever. You can pay for different “skins” to dress your character up, or pay for different dance moves, but the core game is 100% free on every platform.

No Advantages

Related to that, everyone starts every game with the exact same abilities. I might be a “level 87” player, but that’s just for show. You all have the same speed, power, and starting weapons every single time. If you are brand new and play against someone that’s played 2,000 games before, the only advantage they have is experience.

Cross-Play

Fortnite is available on essentially every video game platform, and they can all play with one another. My daughter plays on a PS4 (or sometimes a Nintendo Switch), my friend Adam usually plays on an Xbox, and I’m on a PC — and we can all play together in the same games. It’s a simple concept, but it was undoubtedly quite complex for them to develop.

The Storm

I think the concept of “the storm” is absolutely brilliant. I don’t think Fortnite is the first game to use it, but it makes things go so smoothly.

So I mentioned that you start on an island that’s roughly two square miles. With 100 people on it, when you first land you can quickly find a few folks running around and engage with them. When it gets down to just a handful of players remaining, though, it could potentially take hours to hunt down everyone. This is where the storm comes in.

Every few minutes, a storm starts creeping in from the edges of the map. If your character ventures into the storm, you die rather quickly. As time progresses, the storm gets smaller and smaller until it’s just a few square meters somewhere on the map (the center location of the storm varies, so you can’t plan ahead too far). This forces all players into the final smaller area and ensures that the game will have an ending before too long. That final small gap takes about 25 minutes to arrive, meaning a single game can’t really last longer than that.

Play with your kids

If your kids play, go join them! Even if you don’t play many games, just download it on your computer (it’s free, after all), and the computer/mouse controls are pretty easy to pick up. They can sit in the other room on their PlayStation and you can be in the same game from your computer. You’ll probably get killed pretty quickly, but that’s part of the fun!

If you want to look me up on there and play sometime, my name on there is (shockingly) “mickmel”.

What blank tape?

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In a story somewhat similar to the brown M&Ms, I recently heard a fascinating story about JaMarcus Russell.

If you’re not familiar with Russell, he was one of the biggest busts in NFL history. He went from very highly touted #1 draft pick to out of the league in just a few years. Most of his downfall was attributed to his laziness.

Part of that was easy to see, as he came into each preseason overweight and had to work to get back into shape. He also was having trouble learning the game, and his coaches called him out on it.

As Andrew Marchand shared a few years ago:

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David Diehl just told a great story on the FAN. Coaches didn’t think Jamarcus Russell was studying tapes so they gave him blank cassettes. Next day, he said he watched the blitz packages. The tapes were blank.

While a casual observer might see football being just a bunch of guys running into each other, it’s a highly complex game. Of the major sports around the world, I’d say it’s easily the most complex, particularly to a quarterback. Not only do they need to be some of the best athletes in the world, they have a tremendous amount of information to learn and remember.

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JaMarcus Russell was a huge, talented player with an amazing arm, but without being willing to put in the work he simply couldn’t cut it in the NFL.

His coaches found a great way to prove it.

The features that matter to you

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Back in 2017, I leased a 2018 Genesis G80, part of the “luxury” brand from Hyundai. When the lease was up, I turned it back in and ended 2017 Ford Fusion — and I consider the Fusion to be a better car in every way.

That seems odd, as the newer “luxury” car should seem like the better car. Perhaps it is for some folks, but not for me. The G80 had a sticker price a few thousand dollars higher than the Fusion, so it should have the advantage. Here is where it fell short:

Entertainment system

The entertainment system in the G80 was weird. Super slow to respond to touch, and it seemed buggy. However, I had them look at it a few times and they assured me it was normal. I guess it just wasn’t any good.

On both cars I use Android Auto 99% of the time, but on the Genesis even that was slow to respond. Their entertainment system was simply awful, and I don’t know why.

Horsepower

The Fusion is simply a quicker car. The difference in horsepower isn’t huge (325 on the Fusion versus 311 on the G80), but the Fusion is also more than 500 lbs lighter, which makes a noticeable difference.

App, key fob, and door code

This is where the Genesis was really weird. Let’s start with the Fusion:

  • Their mobile app is fairly simple and can remotely start the car from most anywhere.
  • The key fob can remotely start the car (within a tighter range), like most cars can.
  • They have the keyless entry panel on the driver’s door so you can enter a code to get in. This is GREAT when you go running or hiking and you can just leave the keys in the car.

The Genesis didn’t have the keypad panel, but no one but Ford does that so I don’t really hold it against them. It was their app and key fob that were bizarre, though.

The app was just a hot mess. It tried to do SO much (pulling in your calendar and things like that) which made it a clunky mess. It could remotely start your car, but I generally kept it uninstalled because it was such a battery hog.

The key fob was even more weird because it didn’t include a remote start option. I don’t know why, and they couldn’t tell me. It was app or nothing, so generally it was nothing. So strange.

Heated wheel, cooled seats, and a sunroof

The Fusion has all three of these while my G80 didn’t. Of course, these were options on some G80 packages that I didn’t choose, but the sticker price on the G80 was already higher than the Fusion, so where that extra money go?

Silly little things

Being a Ford guy for much of my life, there are also some little things (such as the keypad entry) that I really like with Ford cars. Here are two small things that Ford does better.

Car stays locked
When I’m getting out of the car, my keys are typically in my pocket. So, out of convenience, I generally just press the lock button the door as I’m climbing out. With the Genesis, that didn’t work because it would detect the keys still “in the car” (in my pocket) and immediately unlock the doors again. I guess it was trying to help, but it wasn’t.

Courtesy swipe
My wife makes fun of me for this, but I love it. When your windshield is dirty and you wash it with the wipers, the car automatically swipes three times. All cars do this. In a Ford though, after the third swipe it pauses for a second or two, and then does a “courtesy swipe” to clean up the dribbles. We all do that manually anyhow, so it’s neat that Ford does it for us.

That leads to really what the problem was — the Genesis wasn’t finished. They already had a few years to get things rolling, but it just felt like they had to cut some corners to get it out there. Maybe that’s not the case, but the G80 simply had too many rough edges to excuse. It’s been a few years now and perhaps the later models are better, but I’ll likely never find out.

The features that matter to you

With that list above, you might be thinking “who cares?”, and you might be right. There are very likely a lot of people that have a 2018 Genesis G80 and absolutely love it because it does what they want it to do. The desires for one person are a lot different that someone else.

All of that said, the Fusion is no longer in production. 2019 was the last year for them and for most sedans from Ford. It’s a shame, as I really thought the Fusion and Taurus were excellent vehicles. We’ll see what happens down the road when it’s time to replace this one, but I’ll be looking for a car with features that matter to me.

Sometimes chance wins

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I recently posted about how luck is a combination of chance, curiosity, and hard work, and I still believe that. If you work hard and stay curious, there is a decent chance that you’ll find yourself “lucky” more often than not.

There are fun stories out there, though, where chance played a huge part in someone’s success. I have two great stories related to music that fall into that category.

Hallelujah

You’ve heard the song Hallelujah in various places by a variety of artists over the years, but it took some incredibly unlikely events to get it into the world. Malcolm Gladwell covered it in his podcast a few years ago (and I strongly recommend that you listen to it here).

It’s a messy story, but essentially:

  • Leonard Cohen spent five years tweaking and re-recording the song, and it went essentially nowhere.
  • John Cale covered it, but it still went nowhere.
  • A woman named Jeannine had a copy of Cale’s album, and when she had a man named Jeff Buckley house sit for her he happened to listen to the album, so Jeff recorded it himself and released it — and it went nowhere.
  • Then Jeff suffered a tragic death, which got his name out there a lot more, and it brought the song to the masses.

Alfo Media summarized the post in a great 9-minute video that you can watch here:

The Piano Man

Billy Joel had a similarly improbable path to stardom. His first album, Piano Man, was released and it flopped. Columbia records stopped producing it, and they told Joel to “go back to the day job”.

By chance, a man named Keith Yates heard the album — he had over 200 promo albums in his house, Joel’s happened to be on top of a pile and Keith was interested in the cover art. After listening to it, he went through a massive amount of work to try to get the world to hear Piano Man. He succeeded, and wrote an incredible recap of how it all went down. It’s a long piece, but it’s captivating from start to finish.

Work hard to make your own luck, but there are always amazing stories of when chance just happens to win out.

The fog of war and the future of technology

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I’m thrilled to have lived in the time period that I grew up in. When I was born in 1976, there was essentially no such thing as a “home computer”, much less amazing devices like cell phones, and I’ve been able to watch as technology has grown up with me.

When I was young, our family got a Commodore 64, and it was great! Things change quickly, though — as a point of comparison, your cell phone today has more than 1,000,000 times the memory that the Commodore had. It’s crazy.

While I’m sad I won’t be around to see where technology goes in the coming hundreds and thousands of years, seeing the vast change over my lifetime (hopefully with much more to come) has been amazingly fun.

Fog

This all came to mind after I saw the post below on Reddit recently. Years ago, games used fog to help hide distant objects and make easier for the computer to keep up with the necessary processing to run the game. While some games made creative use of the fog, the primary purpose was to hide distant objects to help the relatively slow machines handle the game.

These days, fog is used purely to make things look good — it comes at the cost of incredible amounts of computing power, but most systems these days have plenty of power to spare.

Even if I’m only around another 30-40 years, the leaps that we’ll see in future games and applications will be amazing. It’s getting harder to predict, though. Years ago, it was easy to say that games would simply get increasingly detailed and vivid, which we’ve seen, but there’s a point of diminishing returns on that. Heck, we’re even seeing the reverse happen in some cases — instead of Madden Football trying to look more like real life, the NFL is pushing real life to try to match the quality of the game!

I suspect the future will see a lot more in the way of VR and AR, but who knows? All I can tell you is that next time you see a beautiful fog effect in a game, know that the developer put it there for your benefit and not to hide the shortcomings of today’s technology.