Technology is deeper than you think

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I’ve said before that I don’t think Facebook is listening to you through your phone, but the truth is perhaps much worse. The amount of detail (and information they can derive from that) is staggering.

This crazy technology can be a good thing, too. I’ve thought for years that companies like Apple would find a way to monitor things like blood sugar levels with non-invasive sensors, and it seems it’s finally on the horizon. That’s been on my mind ever since I saw this crazy device that can check the safety of drinking water from outside of the cup. Neither of those technologies is perfect yet, but the fact that they exist means perfection is coming.

This kind of “crazy” tech goes back much further. From the book Sapiens came this gem from World War Two:

During World War Two, BBC News was broadcast to Nazi-occupied Europe. Each news programme opened with a live broadcast of Big Ben tolling the hour – the magical sound of freedom. Ingenious German physicists found a way to determine the weather conditions in London based on tiny differences in the tone of the broadcast ding-dongs. This information offered invaluable help to the Luftwaffe. When the British Secret Service discovered this, they replaced the live broadcast with a set recording of the famous clock.

The good news is that the “good guys” are making these kinds of advances as well (if you want to pit companies like Facebook and Google as the “bad guys”). Small companies and individuals are making amazing discoveries. For example, the company behind the blood sugar monitoring tech that Apple is looking at is one you’ve never heard of before (Rockley Phototonics).

In terms of individuals, I’ve noticed this in even smaller situations too. Years ago I created a Risk-like game for Google Earth called “Google Earth War“. It wasn’t too fancy, but made some creative use of how Google Earth worked. Within hours of going live, players were already unpacking it and finding very innovative ways to cheat that I would have never thought of. They were quite brilliant!

These same minds are creating great things today, but they’re also unpacking every version of the Facebook app to find evidence that it’s listening to our conversations — and they’ve never found anything. If Facebook ever tried anything that sinister, it would be revealed almost instantly.

Be scared of Facebook, but be scared for the right reasons. In the meantime, know that so much good is coming from technology and we have an exciting future in front of us.

There’s room for your own island

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When people talk about the big companies online (like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc), it’s easy to think that they make up most of the internet. And while they’re indeed massive, they still only take up small chunks of space compared to the entire web.

To help visualize this, Martin Vargic created a map of the web, with the various countries drawn to their relative scale. It’s amazing work of art!

While you can clearly see the major players on the map, there are a ton of small islands in there (most of which are huge sites), with plenty of room for everyone — including you.

I’ve said it on here many times, but you should absolutely stake your own island in the world. Hanging out on Facebook or Twitter is certainly fine, and can be a great way to keep up with folks, but ultimately you’re playing on someone else’s land. Stake your own plot; there’s room for all of us.

Check out Martin’s high-resolution map if you want to dig in further.

(via Techdirt)

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.

Missive email

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For the last few weeks, all of us at GreenMellen have been using the Missive email app and and it’s been great. Missive is an email program that works with your existing account (Gmail, Office 365, iCloud, etc) and adds some neat features. Here is a quick video that shows what it does:

We aren’t using all of the features that it has, and we likely never will, but there is really one key feature that is killer — comments! It’s weird to think of comments in the area of email, but the way Missive handles it is brilliant.

As an example, if Ali and I both receive an email from someone, we generally need to discuss who is handling it. We can do that via Slack or Text, and that’s fine, but with Missive we can do it inline with the email. In our inbox, just below the email itself, I can leave her a comment and we’re done.

Back to the inbox

Better yet, if Ali were to archive an email and then I commented about it, Missive pulls the email back to her inbox so that she sees the comment. It’s not unlike replying to her email privately (and leaving the original sender out of the loop), but it’s SO much easier to do.

Give access

Perhaps the most impressive thing is that if I tag a teammate in a comment, the entire email shows up in their inbox (including my comment), even if I was the only one that it was originally sent to!

This has been super helpful for times when a client emails me with a question I don’t know. I can write a comment like “@ashlea is this an easy fix?”. The full email will pop into her inbox (along with my comment), she can simply leave a comment back saying “yes it is”, and I can write up my response to the client.

I can even give access to drafts that I’m writing, and others can edit the drafts in real-time, similar to how Google Docs work. As you saw in the video above, you can have teammates add attachments to your email and help you put it together. They can even send it on your behalf, with a warning message from Missive reminding them that they’re sending as someone else. It’s really impressive.

Separation

The real key to all of this is the separation of emails and comments, which it handles well. The concern we all have when writing private emails inside of larger threads is mistakenly leaving the client on an email when we shouldn’t have. This solves that problem perfectly.

It still needs to be a great email client

At the end of the day, though, the stuff I mentioned above accounts for perhaps 10% of the emails I receive. If I’m going to use Missive full-time, it needs to do a great job with the other 90% of my work as well – reading, writing, forwarding, archiving, deleting, etc. So far it’s been pretty solid. Some benefits include:

  • Multiple appearance modes: light mode, dark mode, some inbetween.
  • Solid keyboard shortcuts: they have their own, but can also pull in the standard Gmail shortcuts.
  • Great app support: it works on the web, but has apps for Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android.

We can always go back

What’s really given me the confidence to switch is that it’s really easy to switch back to Gmail if we want. This isn’t some whole new system — it’s essentially just a wrapper on top of Gmail. If we decide to stop using it, we can just stop using it and go back. No worries.

So far it’s been great, and time will tell if we stick with it long-term or not! If you have a team, I encourage you to check it out for yourself.

Electric cars are the new digital cameras

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Back in the mid-90’s, my family got our first digital camera, a Casio QV-11. It was really neat, but took absolutely awful photos compared to film cameras. That was ok, though, because we knew what we were getting into and we knew that each model would get better and better. Plus, it was really fun to use!

Jumping ahead to 2007, the first two models of the iPhone had rather poor cameras on them. They were better than the camera my family had a decade earlier, but they weren’t great — you couldn’t even take a photo of a business card because the resolution wasn’t high enough to read the words. What Apple knew, though, was that the cameras would only get better and eventually we’d get to a place where you could take stunningly good photos and hold essentially an unlimited amount on your device. That’s where we are now.

Electric Cars

It feels like electric cars are where digital cameras were years ago, but some people can’t see the benefits that we’re heading toward. Take this image, which I’ve seen shared a few times on social media:

It’s not wrong. It’s not completely accurate (electric cars are more efficient than gas, making them better even when charged using fossil fuels), but the point is valid. The difference is the future.

At some point down the road, perhaps in 10-20 years, most cars will be electric but a much higher percentage of power will be drawn from renewable sources (perhaps even your own distributed power plant). Using fossil fuels to charge electric cars is simply part of the path of getting there.

If no one had ever worked on digital camera technology before, Apple couldn’t just create the world’s first digital camera today and have it be anything close to what we see on current smartphones. We had to go through the early cameras with relatively poor technology, to slowly get to where we are today. We’re now walking that same road with electric cars.

So yeah, it’s kind of funny that most electric cars are using energy generated from fossil fuels, but this is an essential step to getting to a better world in the future.

We’ll all become parts of a distributed power plant

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While Tesla is known most for their cars, they also have a variety of other battery-focused products. The Tesla Powerwall, which is essentially a giant battery for your home, is one that could really reshape things going forward.

The Powerwall is intended to be used with Tesla solar panels to help keep it charged, though it often needs to be supplemented by the power company to give you enough power for your home.

Over time, though, as solar panels continue to become more effective, you can actually send power back out to the grid to help others, thus turning your home into a small power plant (or at the very least, self-sufficient in the event of a grid outage). Elon Musk sees this as the future.

Gas shortages

Related, here in Georgia, we’re just coming off of a gasoline shortage. It was bizarre and frustrating, but they’re likely to be less of an issue every year as more cars go electric. The drawback with electric cars is that you can’t charge them if there is a power outage, which makes for a similar situation as the gas shortage on our current cars.

These two things coming together (electric cars & solar) should make for a smooth future. Power outages on the grid won’t affect your home, and gas shortages won’t affect your car.

We’re still quite some time before both of those things are true for most folks, largely due to cost (a Powerwall + solar installation will run tens of thousands of dollars for most homes). It’s getting better and cheaper every year, which bodes well for all of us.

Supernatural Exercise

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I’ve found another fun way to exercise, and so far I’ve been excited to dig into it every day. It only works for those that have an Oculus Quest (or Quest 2) VR headset, but it’s pretty neat. It’s called Supernatural — here is their promo video:

The big downside to it, of course, is that you need a VR headset. The Oculus Quest 2 is down to $299, which is quite a good deal, but still a decent chunk of change. As time marches on, though, these devices will continue to get better and cheaper.

The Workout

As for Supernatural itself, it’s a rather intense game. It shares some basic core ideas with Beat Saber by having you hit objects that fly by, but does a few things differently.

First, it goes well beyond just swinging and hitting objects, though that’s certainly the main focus. There are a lot of squats in each workout, and they turn the scene in different directions to keep things moving.

More importantly, the objects you hit are intended to make you move in larger motions with your full arm, whereas Beat Saber lends itself to more “flicking” at objects as they pass by. After 20 minutes, it makes a big difference!

The Music

The music in the game is extraordinary and extensive. I’ve seen a lot of great songs already, and this list shows well over 300 in total, with more being added all the time. They add a new workout every day, which consists of 2-5 songs (depending on total workout duration). I suspect most of those daily workouts use songs already in their system, but it helps keep things fresh.

The Price

This could be the downfall. I’m in the middle of my 30 day trial, but after that it’s $19/mo. That’s not an awful price compared to other home workout apps like Peloton or Mirror, but it’s not insignificant.

As of now, I still feel kind of like the woman in the video above — I really look forward to traveling to crazy places and working up a sweat. We’ll see if that feeling keeps up after a few more weeks.

If you have an Oculus Quest, I certainly encourage you to give Supernatural a look. If you need an excuse to get a Quest, this could be a good one to use!

Finding old versions of any site

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From time to time, it can be useful (or even just fun) to find an old version of a website. Perhaps you need to grab some content from an old version of your site, or maybe you want to see how ESPN looked 15 years ago.

If that’s what you need, there are a few great tools to help you do that.

Google Cache

This only works for short-term items, but is quick and easy. When you perform a Google search, you can click the three dots next to any item in the results, then click “Cached” in the box that pops up, as shown here:

This will show you the version of the site on Google’s servers, likely from the past few days.

Wayback Machine

To go back further, the “Wayback Machine” at archive.org is the way to ride. Put any website address in there, and they’ll show you versions they saved that go back decades. The coverage can be spotty, and some images may be broken, but it’s a fan way to take a look back. For example, here is a screenshot of the GreenMellen website from way back in 2010:

The Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has a tool somewhat similar to the Wayback Machine to find old websites, along with other materials such as books and newspapers.

OldWeb Today

This one is a bit different, but OldWeb.Today combines a few things. Their main feature is allowing you to view any website in very old versions of web browsers, which has some interesting results. However, they can also pull in old versions of your site (from the Wayback Machine) and show them in those old browsers. I find this site to be quite interesting, but not nearly as useful as the other options in this post.

Generally speaking, if you need to find an old version of a website, archive.org is the way to go. However, there are a few different options available to you, so if you can’t find what you need there, perhaps one of the other items I shared could be helpful.

Spam makes it harder for the good stuff to shine

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Spam is just a bad thing. We all hate it. The problem I’m finding lately is that it’s also making good things appear to be more questionable.

“Why did you write about that?”

A while back, I shared on my Facebook about some great new charging cables we bought for our devices around the house. They weren’t cheap, but they did an excellent job and I wanted to tell my friends about these great cables.

I had some good discussions, but one response was:

Are you writing reviews for free stuff? I used to do that then amazon caught me and busted me lol

She assumed that I talked about these cords because I was benefiting from it, which wasn’t the case. I can see where she was coming from — it’s hard to trust anyone’s review of most anything because of affiliate programs and tracking links. You always need to wonder what the motive is behind someone talking about a product, which is very unfortunate. I just wanted to tell people about some great cables that I found, but it was hard for some people to trust my motives.

Seriously, open my video

A few months back, I used the Dubb service to send some quick videos to the people on my membership committee for the Kennesaw Business Association. I spent some time and created 20 separate, unique, 30-second videos to each person on the committee, seeing how they were doing and letting them know about our next meeting.

Of the 20 that I sent, three watched the video and just one replied. That was it! I think people are so used to being hit with “email blasts” (often sent from noreply) that it’s hard for a personal message like that to come through. While I think Dubb is an excellent service, I just have a hard time getting people to open them — even those that I know personally that have specifically asked me to reach out!

Online trust is fading. We shouldn’t hustle people that we want to serve, but it can be hard to stand out among the hustlers. Regardless, I encourage you to stay strong and do the right thing, and the people that watch what you do will see the ways that you stand out.

Averages or adjustments?

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It can be easy to try to design something to fit “the average person”. But do you want to? Or more importantly, is it even possible?

In many cases, an average may not exist. If you’re with a group of people where 50% are Christian and 50% are atheist, it’s not useful to say “the average person in this room sort of believes in God” — none of the people in the room fit that description.

The average pilot

Back in the 1950’s, the U.S. Air Force tried to design a cockpit to fit the average pilot’s body. After measuring 4,000 pilots, they discovered that none of them came close to having an “average” body.

This chart from World War Wings shows what I mean, with the “jagged size profile” of each pilot:

From the article:

But Lt. Gilbert S. Daniels had doubts. He chose to look at each of the 4,000 pilots’ measurements side by side with the average and found a revelation that was shocking for the times. Not a single pilot even came close the measurements of the average.

Averages can work

That’s not to say that all averages are bad. Facebook works to fit the average user, as does Windows, your laptop, the and latest book you read. Trying to completely customize everything would be incredibly inefficient.

Instead of dumping averages completely, working a set of options near the average can be great. You can customize Windows or Facebook to fit your needs, and that’s ultimately what the Air Force did with the introduction of adjustable seats:

While pilots still needed to be within a certain range of dimensions, these new adjustments revolutionized production. The solution was cheap, easy, and better yet, pilot performances soared.

For a bit more, check out this TED Talk that covered this very story: