The coming trade-offs with smart glasses

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I’m really liking my Meta Ray-Ban glasses, and I suspect I’ll always have some form of smart glasses going forward. Specifically, my next pair will almost certainly have screens in them, as there are a lot of options coming out soon that include them. This video from “Mr. Mobile” shows some of what’s on the horizon:

The challenge is that some will have screens, some will have cameras, some will have solid battery life, and I’m sure there will be other features.

It reminds me of the early days of smartphones. Do you want a camera? Or a big screen? Or certain apps? Or a big battery? Phones today essentially have everything you need in every model (the difference between a Samsung and an iPhone is really quite small), but for a long time you needed to choose one feature and be ok missing another.

My next glasses will be the same. Do I really want a screen in them if I have to charge them every four hours? Is the camera more useful than a different feature?

It’ll be a somewhat frustrating few years as the various glasses work their way toward parity, but I’m excited to see where we end up in the future!

It’s time to stop using text messages and iMessage

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Generally speaking, I trust Apple more than the other major tech companies, though that’s admittedly a pretty low bar to reach. That said, Apple’s historic reluctance to let iMessage play nice with other systems is starting to have a real impact on your security, and it’s time for a new solution.

Right now, if you send a message from iPhone-to-iPhone or from Android-to-Android, it’s encrypted and secure. However, if you send one from iPhone-to-Android or Android-to-iPhone, your message has a high likelihood of being intercepted. This isn’t necessary a huge problem most of the time, when your messages are along the lines of “don’t forget to pick up bread on the way home”, but when any message is potentially at risk it becomes a different conversation.

There are a few ways Apple could have solved this over the years, but they’ve chosen not to, so moving to a new platform that works for iOS and Android is the way to go.

Signal

Fortunately, there are simple solutions at hand. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are both encrypted so that no one can read your messages, and I’m moving over to Signal (which is another similar app). All of those apps look and feel like text messages, but your content inside of them is very secure.

A big reason that I prefer Signal is that your message is end-to-end encrypted by default, and that it’s not owned by Meta. Using Signal, even Signal themselves literally cannot read your message — only the sender and receiver can. The same is true of WhatsApp, but Facebook Messenger only works that way if you manually set end-to-end encryption on every message. Really, though, any of those solutions are far better than normal text messages.

A little bit of everything

At the end of the day, I’ll still be sending messages a bunch of different ways. My family will use Signal, and I’ll use it with others when I can, but I’m sure I’ll have plenty of text messages (along with LinkedIn messages, WhatsApp messages, etc) coming and going for years to come.

Every little bit helps.

Pebble is coming back

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

While I’ve had a lot of smart watches over the years, the Pebble is the one I enjoyed the most. It had a great mix of battery life and features and was a fantastic device. Even though it was first released in 2013 and then discontinued in 2016, I was still using it as my main watch more than a year later.

While Pebble did well for a few years, they were purchased by Fitbit in 2016, and then Fitbit was purchased by Google, and the Pebble smartwatch was dead. However, Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky has been pushing for Google to open-source the software behind the watch and they just did.

As a result, Eric has announced plans to produce a new watch using the Pebble software, and intends to make it as similar to the original as possible. He said:

“No one makes a smartwatch with the core set of features I want. I had really, really, really hoped that someone else would come along and build a Pebble replacement. But no one has.”

We’ll see what happens. Even though he’s done this before and now has the code to do it again, it’s a long way from “let’s do this!” to actually shipping a product, so I hope he’s able to succeed.

You can find more information and sign up for updates over on his new website repebble.com.

If he’s able to get it shipped and I get one, I’ll certainly share it here when the time comes. I hope he can pull it off!

Memorize anything

by 2 Comments

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I’ve been working a lot on improving my memory lately, and it’s led me down quite a few roads. I’m trying some new techniques for remembering names, learning some interesting patterns for remembering numbers, and I’ve just build a new web app for helping to remember blocks of text.

The idea of this app is to teach yourself to memorize a chunk of text through a series of increasingly difficult reviews. This could be good for remembering:

  • Poetry
  • Scripture
  • Lines for a play
  • Information for a test
  • Other text that could be useful

Here’s a short video that shows how it works:

You can find the app and set up a free account at memorizeit.net. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on if something like this would be valuable to use or not.

The Meta Ray-Ban Glasses

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses have been out for a while now, and I finally picked up a pair. I needed new glasses anyhow, and I tend to like bold frames, so I figured I’d give them a shot.

If you’re not familiar with them, they’re standard glasses/sunglasses, but with a lot of tech built in. They have a camera on the front, a variety of microphones, and small speakers above each ear. There are other glasses coming later this year that project content (like notifications or directions) onto the displays, but these don’t have that tech yet.

Camera

The camera is the star of the show. You can take photos as well as videos up to three minutes long. The quality isn’t great, but it’s quite good considering the form factor.

It’s surprised me how much I’ve used it already. Your phone takes better quality photos and videos, for sure, but being able to take them with a quick tap is awesome. I’m finding a lot of situation where hands-free video to capture a moment (toasting, playing with the dog, swinging a golf club, etc) is ideal.

AI

They glasses also have a lot of AI baked in, but that’s the least exciting thing for me (at least for now). There are three main things it can do:

  • Respond to questions that you ask, similar to Siri or ChatGPT.
  • Ask it “what am I looking at” and it’ll use the camera to capture a photo and then explain what it sees. This could be somewhat useful at times.
  • It can do real-time language translation. That feature hasn’t rolled out to mine yet, but we’re going to Italy this summer and I could see it being very useful!

Audio

A surprising benefit I’ve found is the audio. The little speakers are directional and just above your ears, so it sounds clear but others around can’t really hear much (it’s similar to hearing a little bit from someone wearing headphones).

There are two things that I like here:

  • It lets me know when I get a text message. I don’t text a lot, and so I often miss them, so this helps with that.
  • You can tap to continue playing whatever bluetooth audio you had going. For example, I often listen to podcasts in the car through the car sound system. When I turn off the car and get out, that audio stops but I can just tap my glasses to keep the podcast going in my ear. It’s amazingly helpful.

Granted, ear buds can do the same thing (and ear buds are better in many ways), but similar to the camera the benefit here is that they’re always ready — just tap and listen.

Phone calls are similar; if I get a call, they’re instantly in my ears and I don’t have to hold up the phone or fumble with ear buds. It’s fantastic.

Battery

I knew going in that the battery was problematic. Batteries are bulky, and they’ve made these as slim as they could, so it’s a tough balance of weight versus battery life.

If I turn off the “Hey Meta” listening feature (and instead tap to summon the Meta AI), that saves quite a bit of battery. Doing it that way gets me about 10 hours of battery life, which includes a bit of use with phone calls, podcasts, and some photos and videos.

The glasses charge in their case, and seem to gain around 2-3% for every minute of charging, so they get back up to speed quite quickly. When I left work a few days ago they were at 19% and I knew I’d want them in the evening, so I popped them in the case for 15 minutes and they were just over 50%.

Case?

The glasses charge in their case, but this obviously means that you need to take them off to charge them. I keep a cheap pair of glasses in the case so I’m not blind while charging, and it works well enough, but it’s still a minor hassle.

It reminds of the struggles that people have charging their Apple Magic Mouse, where you have to stop using it completely while it charges. I’ve seen other smart glasses coming out soon that allow you to recharge by wearing a neck strap, which seems like a much better solution. We’ll see if Meta changes things for the next version of these glasses.

Cost

The cost is surprisingly low for the frames, but as with many glasses the real cost comes from the lenses. The frames start at just $299, which is comparable to other high-quality (and not smart) frames.

I got mine with progressive lenses as well as transitions, so the total cost moved up a bit higher. Compared to other glasses, though, the total really wasn’t much higher than it otherwise would have been.

So far I’m quite happy with them! This tech will be changing quickly, and the next version will almost certainly have some kind of display on the frames so that you can see notifications and other items. Until those come out, these are proving to be a great purchase.

A minute on the internet in 2024

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

As they’ve done for 12 years now (and we discussed last year), the folks at Domo have created a fascinating infographic that shows just how much time people are spending online. Their full write-up is here, and the main image can be seen below:

Some things that I noticed, that happen every minute of every day:

  • Netflix users stream 362,962 hours of content. That’s over 190 trillion hours of content watched per year or over 21 million years of content. Wow!
  • Google’s Gemini receives 8,574 visitors per minute, which seems high until you compare it to Google Search (with 5.9M visitors) or even LinkedIn (with 9,000 job applications per minute).
  • One of the biggest numbers was 138.9M Reels played on Facebook and Instagram every minute — that’s over 73 trillion views per year.
  • The other one that jumped out was that people stream video of other people playing Fortnite at a clip of 1,563 hours per minute, or more than a trillion hours per year. I knew that game streaming platforms like Twitch were popular, but that was a shockingly large number.

I encourage you to check out the full article on the Domo site for more.

What jumped out the most for you?

Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Digital marketing is changing quickly, and there are two big reasons behind it.

  1. AI
  2. Tech company incentives

I’ve talked a lot about the first one, but lately I’m noticing much more of the second.

In short, tech companies are becoming increasingly incentivized to keep users on their site, which is making things a little bit worse for all of us. The implications of this include:

Years ago, Charlie Munger shared this exact idea when he said the title of this post:

“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome”

Tech companies are incentivized to keep users on their sites, and now we’re seeing more and more of the outcome of that incentive. We can’t change how those sites operate, but we can change our mindset and behaviors around it. You should still spend time on social media so people can discover you, but just realize that your actions there will be harder to track than ever. If you do well, people will Google for your company later and that’s the win that you’re really looking for.

Don’t use AI for that

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

There are a ton of great uses for AI, and more coming out every day. However, there are places that you can use AI that are likely not a smart move.

I’m not talking about using AI to cheat on your homework or for other nefarious purposes (though those are clearly bad too), but places where AI can cheat you out of your own efforts.

For me personally, I can think of three areas where AI could likely “help” me but I’m intentionally not using it.

Moving highlights

When I finish a book, the highlights are automatically available via Kindle. There are tools that can take your highlights and automatically move them into systems like Evernote or Obsidian. I choose not to.

For me, the act of copying each highlight and moving it over gives me a chance to reassess if I want to keep it, a chance to group similar highlights together, and a chance to link highlights in my notes to related topics. AI could do much of that work for me, but if I highlighted something with the intent to learn from it, doesn’t it make sense to touch it more often?

Adding content to Anki

Similar is adding new cards into Anki. There are tools to automate that, but why? I use Anki specifically to try to learn and remember new ideas, and the effort to create those cards is a great first step toward learning.

Lots of stuff on this blog

Generally speaking, AI can be a great help for bloggers. You can come up with ideas, write outlines, and even publish fully AI-written posts. In my case, though, those are all bad ideas.

I want to read more to find more ideas, which I often find by linking notes together. For the post itself, my time and effort to write and edit is precisely why I’m doing this at all. Using AI for any of that could be counter to my goals.

AI is awesome, and it’s becoming a bigger part of my life every day, but intentionally excluding it in certain areas seems like a smart thing to do.

Using Google as a leapfrog

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

We all know that the nature of using Google is changing. Between people switching to using AI instead of traditional search, and Google keeping more users on their site, it’s all changing very quickly.

While listening to the annual “State of the Apps” episode of the Cortex podcast, the hosts shared some personal use cases that really stood out to me. Both of the hosts are using AI for the majority of their searches, and only defaulting to Google in certain cases. From the show:

Myke Hurley: “I’m just using Google as a leapfrog as a way to get to the thing that I already know exists.”

CGP Grey: “I’m using Google to get me to a thing that I already know I want to go to; that’s the only thing I’m using search engines for now.”

They debated the differences between various AI tools (they consider Claude to be better, but ChatGPT is often more useful), but they use those tools far more than they use Google.

Granted, they’re both on the extreme side of the innovation curve and most people aren’t there yet, but it’s certainly trending in that direction. As more people turn to AI for answers, getting your business found on the internet will be increasingly tricky to do.

Be “the” choice

The solution is to do exactly what Myke and Grey hinted at — make yourself the “thing that I know I want to go to“. If people are searching Google for businesses like yours, you have a chance to maybe show up. If they’re searching for you specifically by name, you’ve already won.

Be the choice.

Users with disabilities are visiting your website

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

It’s getting increasingly difficult to track how users are finding your website, but there is one thing I can guarantee — users with disabilities are visiting your site, and you should be prepared to serve them accordingly.

I was talking with a (now former) client a few years ago, urging her to do more work to make her website more accessible. Her response was sad and ignorant, saying:

“I am all about helping the disabled maneuver through a website, but that is not my audience. The people I attract are not disabled.”

To be honest, I’m not sure exactly what she meant by that, but she was clearly mistaken. Not only are 10-15% of all internet users disabled to some degree, we all have other issues from time to time that make accessibility on a website even more important.

It’s essential to know your audience and serve them well, and ignoring this aspect of your audience can be a little rude, short-sighted, and expensive if you ever get sued.

Don’t question whether or not users with disabilities are visiting your website. They are, so put in the effort to serve them properly.