If you’re familiar with the history of computing, you’ve probably heard the name William Shockley. Shockley was a brilliant man and helped make computing today possible, as shown with the Nobel prize for Physics that he won in 1956 for “research on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect“.

He was also a horrible human being. Among other things, he said:

“My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro’s intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and, thus, not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in the environment”

As a result of his behavior (detailed well on his Wikipedia page), he had a difficult time keeping talented people at his company and you can trace many of the largest companies in Silicon Valley back to employees that left his firm.

An article in the BBC from a few years ago offers a solid summary:

Only time will tell how Shockley is remembered by the annals of history: as a visionary, hero, Nobel Prize winner, and Silicon Valley pioneer – or as a fanatical racist who died a lonely man.

To me, this sounds a lot like Elon Musk. The man is brilliant, and has brought amazing scientific contributions to the world, but he’s also struggling to retain his reputation, keep his staff, and keep his companies running smoothly. I think it’s very possible that in 20 years we can look back at some of the great new companies that have sprung up and link many of them back to staff that used to work at Tesla or SpaceX.

Like Elon Musk, not everyone hated Shockley. He put himself on the ticket for Senator in 1982 and while he didn’t do well, he picked up a few thousand votes in the primary.

Elon will continue to have his supporters, but I suspect history will show more similarities to Shockley than most would like to see.

Over the years, I’ve gone through times where I really wanted to optimize the use of my mobile devices. I don’t mean “optimize” in terms of removing things, but the opposite — seeing how much work could be done on mobile-only.

We had a client a few years ago that shared a Powerpoint presentation with us, and he was proud of the fact that he did it entirely on his phone during breaks in his day. It was impressive, but it sounded like an awful task to try to do on there!

These days I’m a bit more focused on keeping things specifically for “computer” use versus “mobile” use. For example, every word of blog post that I write (including this one) is written a computer. While I add quick notes from my phone, I don’t even start a draft on there. It’s a computer task. I still keep most apps on my phone just in case I need them, but I’m trying to limit use on there to do the “real” work on my computer.

This means I’m old.

A hot topic lately is the idea of where you are willing to make big ticket purchases. This article on Thrillist sums it up well with things like this tweet:

How about you?

Do you separate tasks for phone versus computer? Do you ever make big purchases on your phone, or is that “laptop activity”?

Technical security is making all of our lives a bit more difficult. Between two-factor authentication, passkeys, and other technical hurdles, things are getting a bit more complex all the time. However, those little bits of inconvenience for you are much larger inconveniences for those that are trying to hack you.

At a recent event, I heard Woodstock mayor Michael Caldwell sum this up very nicely, saying:

“Friction for you is more friction for the bad guys”

Adding more steps to your login can be a bit of a pain, but it only adds a few seconds worth of effort. However, those few seconds to you mean that the bad guys will have a much more difficult (or hopefully impossible) time trying to crack your accounts.

Appreciate the friction for the value it’s bringing to your life.

Signal is a fantastic app that you should probably be using for much of your communication with your friends and colleagues, as I shared a few months ago. However, it’s been in the news recently for some misuse by the government. If Signal is a solid, secure app, then what’s the problem?

There are really two issues at play here:

• If you’re a government official, you shouldn’t be using standard devices like the rest of us use, which seems to be the case here. Even though Signal is secure, the use of an off-the-shelf phone in the hands of high-level government officials is not wise.
• The stuff that makes Signal really good, like their full encryption and ability to auto-delete messages, is not good for government record-keeping.

This was explained very well by Sanjay Parekh on a recent episode of the Tech Talk Y’all podcast, and I encourage you to check it out.

Hillary’s emails

For many, this brings back memories of the email scandal that Hillary Clinton found herself in a few years back. She had done something somewhat similar, using a private email server rather than the official government setup. There’s really no taking sides here, as both parties broke the rules: what she did was wrong, just as what our leaders did in the Signal case was wrong.

At the end of the day, though, this is proving how valuable Signal can be for you and me. Text messages are very insecure, so using Signal for most of your daily communication is a good thing (and you can find me on there if you’d like to reach out). Signal is free and you can find it here for Android, iPhone, Windows, Mac and Linux.

If you work for the government, though, maybe stick to the approved channels instead.

Amazon is making a big change to Kindle that probably won’t impact you directly yet, but it may impact you in the future — and the solution needs to happen today.

For years, you’ve been able to download your Kindle books for use on other devices. I never really have, as the Kindle ecosystem is quite smooth, but the option as been there. As of tomorrow (Feb 26, 2025) that option is going away. As a result, whether you think you need to or not, I strongly suggest that you download all of your books and tuck them away for safekeeping in case you want them later.

Downloading them is simple, but a bit time-consuming. To start, go to your Content Library on Amazon by clicking “Accounts & Lists” > Content Library > Books” (this link should take you directly there). To the right of each book is a “more actions” button, and in that list is “Download and transfer via USB”. Don’t let that scare you, as you’re really just downloading it to your computer.

Now the fun begins — go one at a time and download each book. Fortunately, they’re very small files (average of 1-2MB each) so it’s super quick downloads. Drop them in a folder, and then just save that folder in Dropbox or Google Drive or somewhere for later use.

There are three things to know about this:

• These are your books, and this is the way to actually own them. If you don’t do this today, you’ll never be able to in the future.
• The format that you download the books in isn’t particularly helpful, but it gives you control. If you want to read your books elsewhere in the future, you can use a tool like Calibre to convert them into other file formats.
• This gives you the ability to share books with friends (which is likely why Amazon is cutting it off), but I encourage you not to do that. I believe in rewarding authors for their work, so let’s not steal from them. I’m simply doing this so that I can read the books that I purchased on any device that I want in the future.

If you get stuck, this article from PC Magazine should help a bit. Happy reading!