Better UX via the Mouse Pointer

That arrow is the mouse pointer making the entire area clickable.

Background

Paul Fitts was an Air Force officer who, during the 1950s, developed models of human movements that are now primarily used in human-computer interactions and aviation.

This is CNN

This morning, I was on CNN.com looking at a photo gallery when I noticed that my mouse pointer had changed from its typical pointer to a thin arrow. Depending on which half of the screen I moused over, the arrow either pointed to the right (indicating that I could click to go to the next photo) or left (previous). 

I haven't seen a lot of good use cases for changing the mouse pointer icon via CSS (HTML). Up until now, the best one I've seen is of a hand "grabbing" to indicate that a UI element is draggable.

The beauty of CNN changing the mouse pointer is it makes the entire image, and the area around it, a target without adding a new UI element. A large target, nearby, is one key to good UX. It's what makes the corner pixels on macOS such a great target since the corner pixels effectively have dimensions that are infinite in length. This is why the screen corners are commonly used as a quick way to invoke the screen saver and lock your computer.

Raw Thoughts on Bitcoin

Blockchain could be a game changer for non-repudiation, but it might take many years to be adopted/go mainstream, much like Boolean algebra (AND, OR, XOR, NAND, etc). Boolean (truth) logic was useless when it was introduced in the mid-1800s and now it’s the backbone of electrical engineering and computer science.

Blockchain works like this: You and I sign a contract for a sales transaction (i.e. when you sign the credit card receipt at the point of sale). It's printed on paper and we don't want the other party to lose or change the contract. So, we cut up the contract into pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle (think of this as encrypting the contract). The puzzle pieces are placed into a lockbox for which only you and I have the key. Our lockbox (let's call our lockbox OURS) is then welded to another lockbox (called THEIRS) and info from each lockbox is written on the other. Written on the outside of the lockbox is: "I'm OURS and I'm attached to THEIRS." In essence, lockbox OURS has public info about lockbox THEIRS and vice versa, so all the lockboxes know who they’re suppose to be attached to. Another customer comes along with their lockbox (called SOMEONEELSES) and it's welded to our lockbox, forming a chain of three lockboxes with OURS in the middle. This chain of lockboxes is always shared publicly. The public can see all of the lockboxes and how they're attached to one another, but they can't see what's in side of each one.

If this chain is tampered with, then not only would someone see a missing link in the chain, but even if the two lockboxes on either side of the missing link were reattached, the info on the newly attached lockboxes wouldn't be correct for their new neighbor. 

(Think of blockchain as quantum encoding, if one piece is changed, even by mere observation, then it all breaks down.)

Bitcoin might be touted as a currency, but the IRS has ruled it as property much like gold, which is a good call. Gold has real value (in addition to practical uses in electronics), but it’s not a currency.

The key problem with Bitcoin is its volatility. Investors hate volatility – hustlers love it, and the latter use it to hook in get-rich-quick believing consumers over FOMO (fear of missing out).

A few years ago, someone sent me 0.0001 Bitcoin. At that time, it was worth 7¢, today it would be worth $1.38. A fantastic appreciation, but a totally unpredictable gamble. I don’t think I’ve seen a single Bitcoin transaction used “in the wild” (i.e. purchasing an item, in person or online). Of course, there’s nothing wrong with owning some Bitcoin, I would just consider it a long shot, not an investment.

Fascinating Fact

Since mid January 2009, the inventor of Bitcoin (Satoshi Nakamoto) hasn't spent a penny of his original Bitcoin. The public Bitcoin transaction log shows that Nakamoto's account contains roughly one million Bitcoins. As of 17 December 2017, this is worth over $19 billion making him (or them, if it's multiple people) the 44th richest person on earth.

Mystery Sky Phenomenon

I clearly remember exactly what I was thinking and feeling when I saw last night’s sky phenomenon. I was perfectly calm, which is astonishing given my panic when I was around 10 years old and saw a searchlight painting the bottom of the low clouds at a high rate of speed in Upstate New York. The encounter with the searchlight was the only time I recall feeling sheer terror. 



My first question to myself, last night, was, “What is this?” Is this a comet?  Seems too low… too close... to be a comet. It can’t be a meteor (or is it meteorite?) because the burn is too long. Perhaps a large satellite reentering the earth's atmosphere? I wasn’t seeing multiple pieces so it didn’t seem likely it would have broken cleanly, in half, unless by deign. But I couldn’t figure out the plume. It wasn’t debris. It seemed more like gaseous smoke or contrails. A long, thin jellyfish stretched out behind it, with some event that had happened a minute or so before I looked up into the sky; that event seemed to produced the puff of smoke. I imagine that was the reason why there was a second piece trailing and falling behind the lead object.

I was trying to figure out if the object was burning up from reentry or still burning fuel and climbing up. This is when I wondered if it was the sun that was illuminating the object's contrail. It was hard to judge direction. I couldn't tell if it was moving up and away, or was it moving up and to the direct left.

What was the second object, chasing it? For pure emotional reasons, it felt to me like it had been a part of the the other object. Then I realized it was definitely the sun illuminating this slow, powerful, silent dance in the sky. It didn’t seem at all like danger or a demonstration of war. All these thoughts went through my head in the course of 90 seconds as I snapped photos and recorded video.

What if this had to do with North Korea? We'd have nukes in subs on their doorstep, so this rocket wouldn't be outgoing. Hopefully not something from over there, headed in our direction. I don't want to be in a war that I'm not a part of. Plus, this didn't have the feel of a surface-to-surface ballistic missile.

I calmly got back into my car realizing that I would soon know what I saw since I was witnessing this with thousands of others.

These were my candid thoughts as I posted to social media while explicitly discerning fact from speculation. Social media lit up with photos and videos of the same event. At this point, this event had become a shared experience as I saw other’s view points. No one speculated conspiracy theories, that I saw. Although I did see comments that the vapor trail was self-illuminating, there was a pilot ejection, and someone thought they saw a chute. No reasonable person would think they saw the ejection, etc, if they actually knew what it was they were looking at. This is how human brains work – we speculate to fill in the blanks. We want answers – that’s a big part of what makes a loud cell phone conversation in a restaurant more annoying than two patrons speaking at the same volume. The listener can only hear one side of the conversation and the more of the conversation missed, the more annoying it becomes.

I realized that this didn't feel like a bad thing. It was an experience to share – it couldn’t help but be shared. This was a big event in the hands of a small number of people, so it better be good because otherwise we'd be glimpsing of the power of the gods as they battled it out over our heads.

About 20 minutes after last night's event, I learned that I witnessed a SpaceX rocket launch from Vandenberg AFB. It was seen from Southern California to Arizona to Santa Cruz. I got a little annoyed at myself for not even considering that it could be a rocket launch and staging. In 1996, as I was driving from San Clemente to UCI, I saw what I mistakenly thought was an F/A-18 flying straight up – I thought it came from El Toro MCAS. But it kept going up and up. It, too, was a rocket launch from Vandenberg into orbit. 

It’s a huge production to put a vehicle into orbit, which many got to see, last night. And when it catches you off guard, it feels alien.

Us and Them

Tonight, my cousin said that "Us and Them," from The Dark Side of the Moon, was, "...my favorite Pink Floyd song. So, so beautiful."

My reply was...

Mine too. It's a beautiful song about an officer in war. He stands with his troops during the battles, with the cannon fodder taking the brunt of the casualties. "'Forward,' he cried, from the [relative safety of the] rear, and the front rank died."

The generals weren't even near the fighting. "The general sat while the lines on the map moved from side to side."

The war was futile. "In the end it's only round and round."

Then the officer becomes a recruiter with the battle call...
"Haven't you heard it's a battle of words?"

And he recruits new enlistees for war.
"'Listen, son,' said the man with the gun, 'there's room for you inside.'"

And, before you know it, the war's long over and the old officer is forgotten and homeless, dying on the street. "For want of the price of tea and a slice, the old man died."

That's my take on this song.

Kurt Beyer Radio Interview on Grace Hopper

Here's a great radio interview with Kurt Beyer regarding his book that I read about Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, USN. She faced a ton of challenges as the pioneer of computer programming, and she was a key developer of the COBOL programming language which is still heavily used.

Kurt Beyer and I are from the same hometown and went to the same military college, where he was the highest ranking Midshipman my junior year. He caught my eye, again, when I read his excellent book about Grace Hopper.

http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/2017/12/8/life-legacy-grace-hopper/

Apple Park, Visited

Last week, I gave my Apple talk to a delegation of business people from China. After the talk, we visit Apple's HQ at 1 Infinite Loop for a tour, photos, and opportunity to buy unique Apple products only sold there. On last week's tour we had an added bonus by also paying a visit the new Apple Park Visitor Center which had opened about two weeks earlier. The Visitor Center offers a nice view of the new Apple Park corporate HQ building. It's a large building; the Pentagon would fit in it. It's also an expensive building. Its $5B price tag makes it the most expensive building in the United States, and the fifth most expensive in the world.

The Visitor Center has three areas on the ground floor: store, cafe, and an AR experience area with a scale model of Apple Park. The building is covered by a rooftop deck with tables and chairs offering a relaxing view of the main Apple Park building. 

The group I lead was definitely one of the more excited groups I've spoken to. Immediately after my talk, some of them were stopping me for a one-on-one photo opportunity while still in the classroom. After our group photo, about 30 of them queued up to take more individual photos with me in front of 1 Infinite Loop. Then, inside the store, I continuously felt gentle tugs on my jacket sleeve for more photo opportunities. After the group boarded the bus and headed off to the airport, my translator and I had a chance to grab a cup of coffee and relax. She told me that it was almost unsettling to have been literally pulled in multiple directions as the tour group members requested that she translate their wishes to the Apple employees in the stores.

The Apple Park Visitor Center is open to the public – I highly encourage you to pay it a visit.

iPhone Backup Trick

Problem

What do you do when you run out of disk space on your Mac and can't backup your iPhone?

Solution

Create a symbolic link for your iTunes backup folder, linking it to an external hard drive.

Details 

There are two ways to backup your iPhone. You can back it up to either iCloud or iTunes. iCloud is convenient because it happens automatically (daily) when the phone is charging and on a WiFi network. But, the downside of an iCloud backup is that the restoring process can take days – many days – depending on your bandwidth. Even if you have a blazing fast Internet connection, the bottleneck will be with iCloud's servers since your personal data isn't cached on a CDN.

I typically keep my iPhone set to backup to iCloud until I buy a new iPhone. With a new iPhone, I'll connect it to iTunes and choose to make an encrypted backup to my hard drive and then I'll restore the backup to the new iPhone. (Choosing the encrypted iPhone backup option will save your passwords, and other sensitive data, thereby saving time when you restore from your backup.)

But, since my iPhone 7 has 256 GB of storage, I quickly discovered that I didn't have that much free space on my MacBook Air. What to do? I tried freeing up some space, but that wasn't enough.

Then I remembered that I had a 2 TB external hard drive with enough free space. So, I dropped to the command line and created a symbolic link to the external drive. To accomplish this, go to Terminal and cd to:

/Users/username/Library/Application Support/MobileSync

I temporarily renamed the Backup folder, under MobileSync, to Original Backup. Then I created the UNIX symbolic link, with the name Backup, to a Backup folder on the external drive:

ln -s /Volumes/MyExternalDrive/Backup 

Once I created the link to the external drive, I changed my backup option, in iTunes, to "This computer" and clicked the Back Up Now button. It took a few hours, but that was better than a few days. After the backup completed, I connected my new iPhone X to iTunes and restored the back up (which took about two more hours), then deleted the symbolic link, and changed the Original Backup folder name to Backup.

Initial Setup

Old iPhone 7 shaking hands with my new iPhone X

Finally, my favorite part of the iPhone X is, to initially set it up, I simply placed my old iPhone 7 next to my new iPhone X. The iPhone X sensed the older iPhone 7, asked for my PIN, and viola, it began transferring the initial setup information.

Gestures

Need help learning the new iPhone X gestures?
This 5' 30" video will get you primed up.

Face ID

Face ID seems to be working as expected. Frequently, in the time it takes for me to pick up my iPhone X and adjust my grip, it's unlocked.

With Apple's Face ID on iPhone X, the odds of a false positive is down to 1 in a million. That loosely means there are 7,500 people in the world who can unlock my iPhone X – that's a huge improvement over Touch ID which theoretically gave 1.5 million people the ability to unlock my iPhone with their fingerprint.

Supreme Court May Overturn Third-party Doctrine

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a closely watched case tomorrow that will determine whether authorities can search your cellphone location data without a warrant. This dispute could change decades of privacy precedent.

At issue, for SCOTUS to decide, is the third-party doctrine, which says, if you hand your data (e.g. your location) to a third-party then you shouldn't expect it to remain private.

Currently, law enforcement can access much of your information simply by asking for it from the phone company or your ISP. While they frequently can't hand over your content, they can easily discover your location and who you communicated with. We're talking about metadata, which is data about data and how to route it. The USPS currently takes a photo of every letter and package mailed in the US and these images can be used by law enforcement.


One of the most read pieces on this blog, with over 100,000 page views, is a post about Facebook privacy. Then, I discovered that Facebook was keeping track of me via breadcrumbs. Would you like to see if Google is also keeping tabs on you? Then visit history.google.com.

Litmus Test

For tomorrow's case, Orin Kerr submitted a brief on behalf of the government arguing that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect location data because it’s the equivalent of being observed in a public space. 

I think Kerr's argument falls short because this data allows us to be observed in private spaces, too.

My litmus test is: how would this apply to the POTUS? Most of us would agree that we shouldn't expect privacy, in the case of a video surveillance camera recording us, in public. If the President walks down a street in New York City, many cameras will record him. But, shouldn't the President's exact location be private, in private? Did the President tweet from the Oval Office, his bedroom, someone else's bedroom, or perhaps a bathroom? Cell phone location accuracy using GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc can be accurate to within a few meters.

The current challenge is that technology is evolving so quickly that consumers don't fully understand how they unknowingly yield their privacy, and laws have not caught up with citizens' expectations or understandings.

Unlocked GSM iPhone X Confusion

I'd like to upgrade to an iPhone X – as soon as one's in stock. Today, I stopped by my local Apple Store and spoke to an employee about which one I should get. For my last few versions, I've had unlocked, contract-free iPhones with AT&T until I switched to Cricket. The rep at the Apple store told me two key things. First, that all iPhones are now unlocked (and have been for a while). Second, I'd have to get one of the iPhone models that work with Verizon or Sprint. That didn't make sense since Verizon and Sprint are CDMA while AT&T, Cricket (which is owned by AT&T), and T-Mobile use GSM.

When I got home I called 1-800-My-Apple. The CSR referred me to Apple's LTE carrier support page (which only makes it clear which carries the phone may work with, not a particular model). While I looked that over, he explained to me that Apple's GSM iPhones only support GSM, whereas their CDMA iPhones support both. That now makes sense – I always wondered why the CDMA iPhones had a SIM tray (part of the reason is that the LTE standard also uses SIM cards).
I learn something new every day.

Further reading:
https://9to5mac.com/2017/10/26/iphone-x-carrier-compatibilitiy
https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2407896,00.asp

The Future of AI

Things we enjoy in the real world, we don’t like online. I like it, when I walk into my local coffee shop, that they know my favorite food or drink. But, it seems creepy when I visit Facebook and see ads for products I searched for, days ago, on Amazon.

Like all technology, we’ll learn how these interactions work and we’ll get used to it, especially those who will grow up with it. But we sometimes forget too quickly; especially if we didn't live through it. Even our grandparents are too young to remember a time when people scoffed at teenagers, living a hundred years ago, because they learned to drive a car instead of ride a horse. 

AI of tomorrow, like the iPhone X, will know who you are from more than touch (PIN or Touch ID). Like another person, the iPhone X can now see literally see and recognize who you are. And it already knows exactly where you are. Perhaps, its camera and microphone will guess more about what you're doing before you ask, if we can trust it.

Living with AI will be like living with a new species. Almost human, but not quite, probably even after passing the Turing Test.

Yesterday's Mediocre Newspapers, Today's Ad Servers

It seems that yesterday's mediocre newspapers are today's most prolific ad servers, with clickbait (yellow journalism) websites jumping on the bandwagon. I get it... I understand that news sites need to make money, which they do with ads. But, print news ads were never intrusive or intertwined within articles as current news websites are, today.

Nowadays, I visit my local newspaper's website and I'm playing whack-a-mole as I x-out pop-up ads. Then, after reading about a dozen stories, I end up needing to either go into private browser mode or use Safari's Reader Mode (shift-command-R) to get around their paywall (the latter only works on unsophisticated news sites).

I understand why newspapers need to do this and it's a tough business they're in because nearly all the news on their website can be found elsewhere. Plus, consumers aren't used to paying for news, making it even harder to charge for online subscriptions. Paying for a newspaper subscription was a different story in the "old days" since the customer was buying atoms (a product, the physical newspaper), not electrons (a service, the online news).

The thing about newspapers is they, in particular, had an atypical revenue model before ten years ago.  Back then, their revenue came primarily from business display ads and consumer classifieds. Interestingly enough, while home subscriptions contributed to their revenue, it did so in an odd way. Specifically, newspaper companies realized that each time they raised the price of their newspaper, subscriptions would drop off. But, even though the newspaper was generating less revenue from subscriptions, in the short term, they kept their display ads and classified ads prices the same. Therefore, they'd generate the same revenue from their primary source (ads) while printing fewer newspapers. Then, their sales people would start calling up former subscribers and new customers to get them to subscribe.

What About 24 Hour TV News?

I get virtually all of my news online, almost all in print, because I don't have a TV. The nice thing about getting my news all in print is that, until an article is updated, there no new news to report. Whereas, on TV, the news stations will rebroadcast the same video footage, repeatedly, while having experts speculate on matters. Additionally, TV news programs frequently add video and sound effects (moving backgrounds, swooshing graphics, music, slow-motion video, etc); none of which is vital to the facts of the news story. Watching the same harrowing video, on TV, over and over again, does nothing to ease the public's angst. As a matter of fact, it makes it worse; to the point of addiction, especially in cases of terrorism.

Q: So, what's the best thing to do to deal with news, especially on terrorism?

A: Watch this Vox video...

TIL: Traveling with Airbnb and Alaska Airlines

Today I learned (TIL) two things while booking travel to Cupertino.

1. Airbnb hosts are allowed to decline guests based on gender (but only if the host shares living spaces with their guest). In other words, a host can choose to only rent to a guest of the same gender; i.e. women can choose to rent to only women and men can choose to rent to only men in cases of shared spaces. However, a host cannot choose to only rent to a guest of the opposite gender.

2. Alaska Airlines has dirt cheap flights between San Diego and San Jose (<$60 one-way, including fees and taxes). But they’ll charge you an extra $11.95 to pick your seat. Since the plane I’m flying on has no middle seat, it didn’t matter.
Update: I may have made a mistake about Alaska Air; the $11.95 pick-your-seat fee may have been a fee charged by the online travel agent (justfly.com). I'll let you know if I find out more info.

Le Mobile Feast: An American Adventure

Facebook reminded me that, two years ago, I went shopping with Steve Le as he looked for a teardrop trailer to tow behind his car.

Steve was in the early stages of planning an adventure across America where he would cook a dinner party in every state while writing a book about it. He decided to pass on the trailer in lieu of sleeping in the homes of his dinner party hosts for a more intimate connection. He realized that, while people may keep up their guard at a large dinner party, they lower it in the morning when wearing pajamas, while drinking coffee, in their own kitchen. 

Le Mobile Feast: Dinner Party One

I first met Steve a few years ago at a local Naval Academy chapter happy hour in San Diego. We immediately clicked since we both had open minds and enjoyed writing (the name of his adventure, Le Mobile Feast, is a hat tip to Hemingway's book, A Movable Feast). I've been to about ten of his dinner parties in California and a couple in New Orleans. I clearly recount what's become known as "Dinner Party Zero," on the 2015 winter solstice, at my place in downtown San Diego. That was followed shortly thereafter by "Dinner Party One" at the home of my girlfriend. To add a little mystery... a year after Dinner Party One, we had a "special" dinner party.

Along his journey he's interviewed many people and he has been interviewed on NPR. Steve's still working on the details of his book. Initially, he was considering writing a story about every stop and sharing the recipe. But, since he's become an empirical authority on U.S. citizens, he'll probably focus more on contrasting American politics during the final year of Obama and the first year of Trump.

You can follow his adventures on his website.

By the Numbers

Elapsed time: 21 months

States visited: 42

Cities visited: 98

Dinners cooked: 168

Plates served: 1,353

Dogs: 82

Target Charging Kiosk

Have you ever walked into Target with a low battery charge on your phone and say to yourself, "I wish Target had a secure way to recharge my phone while shopping."

Lo and behold, Target has a locker kiosk exactly for that. Of course, my shopping list was on my phone (along with Pay). But it's still an improvement from the old days when I'd get to the grocery store and have to guess what I wrote on my shopping list that I left back home. It worked exactly as expected. I entered my phone number, e-mail address, and picked a security image from a list (dog, picnic, fire pit, etc) and then I choose a locker. To retrieve my phone, I entered my phone number, tapped my security image, and the locker opened. Simple.

Fake News, the First Amendment, & Critical Thinking

The challenge with fake news is it is protected by the First Amendment. Even a lie is protected by the First Amendment, in most circumstances (and there are clearly times when lying is OK).

The problem with fake news is "the amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." This is known as the bullshit asymmetry. And this is a rare case when it's easier to create something (the lie) than destroy it.

We commonly see spin and propaganda in business and politics; they're pretty much both the same thing, depending on the context. I like to think of spin as highlighting the lie in a truth or the truth in a lie. Or, to put it gently, spin is about highlighting the positive in a negative or, especially in politics, the negative in a positive.

The solution to fake news is critical thinking. I will not tell you what to think. But, I am willing to show you how to think. And I am willing to tell you what I think. The rest is up to you.

The most important part of critical thinking is to know the source, confirm the facts as best you can, and understand (prioritize) the importance and relevance of arguments and ideas. If it doesn't make sense, then double-check it and avoid confirmation bias because once we make up our minds about something we tend to stop learning about it. At the end of the day... It's not enough to be right. It's more important to be effective.

And, never forget: Snopes and Wikipedia are your weapons in the war on ignorance. Open your eyes, only justice should be blind.

Steal an iPhone, Then What?

My buddy recently spent a couple weeks in Europe, traveling with friends. He went there for Oktoberfest then visited Italy, the Netherlands, and France. While in Paris, someone stole his buddy's iPhone. They tracked it down to a street corner where they found a group of hooligans (there's a word I rarely use); when confronted, the kids ran off.

My buddy and I both used to work at Apple, so we discussed what someone could do with a stolen iPhone. We concluded that a stolen iPhone is useless without the login and password, even if you replace the SIM card. Around 2010, iPhones and iPads were becoming hot items, making them a key item to steal. A common problem on the NYC subway was that a thief would snatch it out of a victim's hand when exiting a subway car as the doors were closing.

In response to the rash of thefts, Apple began making it impossible for an iPhone (or iPad) to be used without the proper credentials. These devices can't be reset to factory settings; so, if you forget your PIN or Apple ID login and password then your device is bricked.

UPDATE 8 Nov 2017: I asked a question at this morning's Tech Coffee, "What good is a stolen iPhone?" and an entrepreneur answered with "Spare parts."
Can iPhones be stripped like a stolen car? Perhaps the screen?

Tips for Getting Back into the Cockpit

Flying to Catalina.

One key thing I learned from Dave Winer about blogging is that its purpose is to narrate one's work. Whenever I type up a long "how to" e-mail, I realize that other's can probably use the info so I post it to my blog.

A classmate from the Naval Academy wrote me, today, saying that she wanted to get back into flying and she asked for my opinion. 

Here's my response...


Hello Melissa,

Great to hear from you.

Head-set, what type do you use? 

I used https://www.clarityaloft.com headset. It uses foam hearing aid plugs which provides excellent passive noise reduction (plus it doesn’t press against your glasses/sunglasses like traditional headsets). When I was learning to fly, a couple of my instructors were using headsets with active noise reduction (i.e. like Bose), but their batteries kept dying making the noice cancellation useless until they replaced the batteries.

If a helicopter uses the same two prong headset connector as a fixed wing plane then it should work.

Ipad? What are you using? Wi-fi, or the wifi plus cellular?

I always fly with my iPad using the ForeFlight app. It is phenomenal. It graphically shows TFRs, weather, etc. I have cellular so I can file a flight plan via ForeFlight  But cellular isn’t required. When you subscribe to the app, you can use it on two devices like an iPad and iPhone, so you could file your flight plane (VFR or IFR) via your iPhone.

You don’t need data connectivity when flying because ForeFlight downloads any VFR and IFR charts that you need, plus it’ll download the approach plates so you can see your position on an approach as well as on a taxi diagram. 

I have a Stratus receiver that I place above my panel and it relays NexRad weather and traffic to my iPad, plus Stratus has WAAS to augment GPS with accuracy down to one meter.

Kneeboard? Type you use?

I have a generic kneeboard that I bought at my flight school. Nothing special about that other than it has a bunch of handy stuff written on it like light signal codes for loss of communications, special transponder frequencies for emergencies, etc. 

Any sectionals or maps you recommend?

The FAA allows private pilots to use ForeFlight as an EFB (electronic flight bag) in lieu of paper maps/charts, A/FD, etc. Keep in mind, though, that technology can fail. I had that happen once, after I landed at an airport, so I pulled out my iPhone and used the taxi diagram on my iPhone to taxi. I still print out my approach plates and taxi diagrams and have them clipped to my yoke.

Anything else you can recommend to help get me back in the air?

I don’t use anything from Jeppesen only because, when ForeFlight first came out, they used FAA approach plates and charts. Now, ForeFlight offers Jepp, but what I’ve been using is great.

Of everything I mentioned, ForeFlight is the most important to me. You can probably download it and try it for free for a month or so to check it out. It’s amazing. It’s revolutionized cockpit resource management for the single pilot.

One other piece of gear that I love is my Brightline flight bag. It’s modularized to be taken apart, but I always fly with the entire bag. It holds my iPad, Clarity Aloft headset, Stratus receiver, clipboard, charts, flashlight, emergency hand held radio etc.

How’s that sound?

Don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any more questions.

Cheers,

Joe

Daylight Saving Time: A Coders Achilles' Heel

Good news – tomorrow's a 25 hour day! Most of us get an extra hour of sleep.

It's also a day when date/time bugs are discovered in code. It's an easy mistake for software engineers to make: thinking that there's always 24 hours in a day.

"When is tomorrow?" asks a coder. Well, I'll just add 24 hours to midnight – a common error that I've seen. Adding 24 hours only works if you add it to, say noon, but not midnight. 

When I worked at Wyndham, a business analyst (BA) reported a bug in our hotel booking website. He told us, in our morning meeting, that QA booked a weekend (three nights; arrive Friday and depart Monday). At checkout, the system was reporting only two nights even though the correct Friday – Monday days was displayed. As soon as the BA said it only happened on one weekend, I immediately knew the problem. I said, "See if that weekend coincides with daylight saving time." Sure enough, it did. It made me look smart, but, truth be told, I had not only made this same mistake myself, as a WebObjects developer at Apple, but I had seen this bug deep in the inner workings of WebObjects prior to version 4.5.

It easy to think that every day has 24 hours and it's hard to test for all the edge cases in software.

Do Not Call Registry

I think the phone company and our federal government's Do Not Call registry (https://donotcall.gov) are letting us down.

The cell phone network is a closed system, which gives the phone companies complete control over who accesses it; so, I'm thinking that it wouldn't be too hard to block calls displaying a caller ID from a disconnected/out of service phone number in the same way that Gmail blocks or filters spam. 🤔

The Entrepreneur's Pitch: Keep it Tidy

Keep your pitch tidy.

I've mentored many entrepreneurs over the years – they usually come from a "maker" background in that they make things. Typically, they make physical products or they are software engineers. Most of them are in the midst of their careers as individual contributors. They usually work quietly at their desks without much interaction with others. While this is great for their productivity, it doesn't give them the soft people skills to communicate clearly when interacting with other people.

I've listened to some entrepreneurs take 15 or 30 minutes to explain to me what their product does. That's 60 times too long. For a conversation opener, it should take a couple sentences to tell someone what your company or product does. Longer than that and people lose interest and they're not going to want to work with you.

If you don't know how to do this then practice. Start off with telling the listener if your "thing" is a product or service. "We manufacture an LED light that's an alarm clock for your nightstand which is more effective at waking you up compared to an alarm clock."

That single sentence is how I'd describe TheUplight. Most importantly, it leads with the benefits, not the features. From that sentence, the listener can follow up with their own questions, i.e., "Why is it more effective?" which the entrepreneur behind The UpLights responds with, "The UpLight gently prepares your body for waking up to reduce morning stress and increase productivity throughout the day."

The problem with listing a litany of features is that customers then have to figure out how those features would be of benefit. I know this sounds simple, but it can be very difficult to focus on what's marketable. For example, "it's patented" isn't marketable. While that tidbit is marketable to venture capitalists, it's not a buying decision factor for consumers. I don't care if I buy a patented or patent pending product. Big whoop. So, knowing your audience is important, too. But, regardless of your audience, make your point succinctly. There's a lot of noise out there.

Here's one of the best example I know of about succinct marketing, "1,000 Songs in your Pocket."

Student Learning in the 21st Century

A few years ago, I heard about some teachers who were "reversing the classroom" by posting their classroom lesson videos on YouTube. Students would watch the lessons at home and then do their "homework" in class. This gave the teacher a more effective opportunity to help students work through the lesson's problems, rather than the students' parents. It seems like a good idea for more affluent school districts. However, one teacher I know, with ties to the Kibera slums in Nairobi, quickly pointed out that it wouldn't work in all areas.

The Gouge

I went to a military college which had a tightly organized student body where we maintained file cabinets of past exams and quizzes. If a professor gave the same test as before then students would have a leg up. When I brought this up with a friend, he pointed out that a well know textbook rental company started getting into a similar business. When I hear of business ideas like that I ask myself, "Why didn't I think of that?"

Communal Note Taking

With apps like Google Docs, where multiple people can edit a document at the same time, students now use it for collaborative note taking during lectures. Brilliant.

Wikipedia

Students can't cite Wikipedia as a source. But any decently written Wikipedia article will cite sources – so students can cite the original source.

The worst of the privileged white men

The worst privileged white men are the ones who have no idea, or refuse to believe they're living in a different context than others.

And context matters. 

Otherwise we wouldn't celebrate the minor achievements of children or have age groups at 5Ks. Why do we celebrate them? Because they represent the best-of, and significant progress forward.

Context matters.

Let money be the absolute quantitative decider and let love be the qualitative one.

Medio Maraton y Ultramaraton 57K in Mexico

This was one dirty forest.

As I descended from the mountain top into the depths of the ashes that had once been a scenic forest it seemed that hell had been here and moved on. It wasn't possible to go up and down the mountains without grabbing onto the dead trees wrapped in a bark of soot. Wearing a white shirt was a poor choice of colors for me. I mean, seriously, who wears white after Labor Day?

The beautiful forest that the trail took us through had been torched by wildfire, last month, leaving dirt and dusty ash with charred bark on the trees. It took two showers for me to get clean. 

Don't let that smile fool you. It's a facade.

This was one of the most grueling races I've done in terms of the trail. The mountains were so steep that going down them at any pace was a challenge and walking up was at a slow crawl that was nearly unbearable. It became my own personal Vietnam.

If I stopped to take a breather, while feeling sorry for myself, the vultures would start circling (jk).

I don't know if I'll do this race again, but it was a memorable one, especially with people cheering me on in a domestic language that was foreign to me.

Dirt, dust, and ash.

A Symbolic Look at Equifax

Here’s a video that symbolizes my interactions when enrolling in Equifax's credit monitoring service (audio is a must with this video). Nothing like a happy-go-lucky bear caught in a bear trap. 

Details

1. I checked to see if my data was compromised. (Some people reported yes, some reported “We believe that your personal information was not impacted by this incident.”) Fortunately, mine was the latter: https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/potential-impact/

2. I clicked “Enroll,” and I provided my information. Then, I waited several days for a confirmation e-mail for the next step. (http://trustedidpremier.com)

3. I clicked on the link in the confirmation e-mail. I provided a little more info and got redirected to a web page asking for me to login, but I never set up a password. (https://www.trustedid.com/premier/myaccount.php) 

4. I clicked “Forgot password” and received a reset-password e-mail to set up my first time password.

5. I set up a new password and clicked login after confirming my info.

6. I repeatedly received a “Server is down” error message.

7. I waited (hours/days) and kept trying while continuously receiving “The server unexpectedly dropped the connection” error messages.

To be fair to Equifax, it’s virtually impossible to standup a website in a matter of days/weeks that could handle a load of this magnitude. (Remember when Twitter used to go down – “Fail Whale” – in the early years? Facebook avoided this problem by managing their rollout over college campuses to control their growth and server load.)

In the Equifax case, server downtime works in their favor since less people will enroll. And it gets very confusing for consumers when dealing with so many different domain names (equifax.com, equifaxsecurity2017.com, trustedidpremier.com, trustedid.com, etc).

I’ll report back when I’m able to successfully enroll. I'm still getting a "server is busy" error message.

Anyone else have luck enrolling?

iPhone X Form Factor and Security [u]

Perhaps. One solution is to turn off
the phone at LEO encounters

Over the past two days, a surprising number of friends and colleagues have asked for my opinion on the iPhone X. This new smartphone seems to have received a lot of attention.

While I love the new features, I'm concerned about the form factor. Initially, it seemed to be as big as the iPhone 6/7 Plus models, which is too big for me. (I've been using the iPhone 6 & 7.) 

It turns out I was wrong about the size. Compared to the iPhone 7, the iPhone X is about about one tenth of an inch higher and about 0.15" wider. So, it's slightly bigger than the iPhone 7. And, compared to the iPhone 7 Plus, the iPhone X is about half an inch shorter and quarter of inch narrower, making the X significantly smaller than the 7+. The beauty of the iPhone X is that the screen is more than a quarter of an inch larger than the screen on the iPhone Plus models (6, 7, and 8). That's a bigger screen on a smaller phone due to the X's edge-to-edge design.

So, the bottom line is I'm considering getting the iPhone X. 

Face ID

Instead of using Touch ID's fingerprint recognition feature for authentication, the iPhone X uses Face ID, which recognizes a person the same way humans do, by their face. Apple claims that Face ID is 20x more accurate than Touch ID, which is great. But, some people have raised alarms that law enforcement officers (LEOs) could take you into custody and simply unlock your phone by pointing the screen at your face. Could that really happen? Perhaps. But, I've seen alarmist headlines before ("Apple Crosses The Line With New iPhone Feature"). One way to protect against this is to simply not enable this feature for people who are deeply concerned. Another option, if Face ID is turned on, would be to simply turn off your phone before a LEO encounter (i.e. crossing international borders, etc). 

Each time the iPhone is turned on, the secure enclave, which processes your Touch ID or Face ID credentials, remains inactive until a person manually enters their PIN to decrypt this information. It appears, during Craig Federighi's demonstration of Face ID, that his demo phone had been restarted but not unlocked with the PIN, prior to his demo. This prevented Face ID from working. While that's the correct technical behavior, it happened at the wrong time – but he seemed to recover well during the demo.

Update: Apple's Craig Federighi details Face ID and how to quickly disable it.