spacefem, posts by tag: technology - LiveJournal

figured I'd dedicate an entry to something I revealed in comments with harbourwitch... status of my new iphone.

Previously on the lj here I wrote that I was getting a new phone and wanted to be cautious and protective of it, which I was NOT doing with my old phone, I dropped that thing all the time. So in that beautiful entry (https://spacefem.livejournal.com/1…) I identified three high-risk tasks that contributed to most of my phone drops:

1) Handling it while walking/running/moving
2) Leaving it in insecure pockets
3) Transitions from bag to table

Well, #2 was the one that got me. I was wearing leggings with pockets - a great invention! The pair I was wearing that day have back pockets on the butt cheeks like jeans.

These are athleta leggings, decently thick and supportive but still very stretchy. I had the phone in one of those back pockets, went to the restroom, I was taking them down to sit on the toilet and the phone just plopped out straight into the water.

I freaked and took it out immediately, took it out of the case, dried it off, chlorox wiped it (good thing toilet water was clear but it's still toilet water).

Because the 2020 SE is "water resistant" everything SEEMED fine!

Hours later, I went to bed and plugged it in to charge like always.

The next day, I woke up and there was a warning on my phone to the effect of "water detected in charging port, unplug me and let me dry out." Awe CRAP! I hadn't seen that warning when I went to bed, I plugged it in and went to sleep. so the cable was plugged in all night!

Ever since then, it doesn't charge with the lightning port cable.

By some miracle my earbuds still work that use the same port! So I guess output works, input does not.

Marc already had two wireless charging pads so that's how I charge my phone now. But it was a lesson. I was also reminded of last year when I read Digital Minimalism, I spent a month very consciously taking my phone to fewer places. The bathroom was one of those places. Meals were the other. This was a great idea, because you really shouldn't have A Thing that you take both to the bathroom and to the dinner table, right? You wouldn't grab silverware to go eat and hold it in your hand while you're sitting on a toilet, that would be super gross. So I also could have avoided this by not allowing my phone to be in the bathroom at all. Good idea, if I can stick to it. But I really love holding the internet in my hand.

I've left a few bad reviews on free iphone apps for being misleadingly unfree.

Trust me, I am aware that I do not deserve everything for free, and I know software developers have to eat too. I just think it's REALLY hard to make a decision about which apps to choose when they pretend to have a free version that is nothing but a storefront to sell you a more expensive app - in some case a LOT more expensive, or with a recurring subscription cost.

I feel like if you're going to offer an app for free it should be useful. It's very frustrating to download, say, an app to teach your kid the alphabet and it immediately cuts off at the letter M and asks you to pay $14.99 for the pro version. There might be a great app that I didn't download that was $4.99, because I thought yours was free.

I will frequently throw some funds towards a free app that I've spent a lot of time on. But I get really mad when I've spent no time at all and free app is just there to show me where some buttons might show up in the pro version.

Anyway, in response to my bad reviews the owners responded with "developers gotta eat" kind of responses. Well then just charge for it.

I am the proud owner of a new iphone 2020 SE this week. I previously had an iphone SE OG or whatever, from 2016, but maybe I got it in 2017? I'm not sure. but the new one is NEW. Still 64Gb, and only slightly larger because I don't want a huge phone, but it has a better camera, wireless charging, and... guys... A13 BIONIC Hexa-core processor! BIONIC! Nobody knows what that means!

Reasons I got a new phone:
- Old one was weirdly picky with what chargers it would keep drawing current from. There were too many times when I said, "I plugged my phone in for an hour, but who knows if it's charging"

- Screen was starting to get weird lights at the top from being dropped too much.

- Spoonflower sales were great this year, I need something to write off the impending taxes.

One issue with a new phone is the PRESSURE. You have to be nice to it. You just paid a lot of money for it. Don't drop it, don't crack anything. When you have an old phone, you stop caring. It's an old phone. If it breaks, its time has come.

The last few days of old phone I tried to make mental notes of times when I either dropped it or almost dropped it, so I'd know the likely situations.

Scenarios that increased the odds of phone dropping:

- Handling the phone while walking, standing up, leaving, or running. Especially running. I'd be jogging for miles outside, half grab it out of a pocket, throw it on the concrete and kick it down the damn street. I thought oooh I can't do that when I have New Phone!

- Leaving it in an insecure pocket. Jeans pockets are great. Hoodies, especially zipper hoodies, are very bad. I'd lean over or shift positions and there goes phone. Work business jackets have misleading pockets, they seem great but my phone would fall out all the time.

- Taking phone out of purse/bag/pocket and setting it on the table. If not done carefully, this transition could be risky.

Looking at this list it's amazing my old phone made it the years it did. I seem to have decent luck with them. So I hope this one makes it for a long time, too. It has a case. And I am being very careful.

I decided to do the digital detox thing. I deleted all "optional" apps off my phone... facebook, reddit, pokemon go, bejeweled, pinterest, etc. I am making a conscious effort to leave my phone behind when I can. I'm kind of surprised I haven't lost my phone yet - that's really where I see this going.

I have not yet achieved inner peace.

The book says humans need time spent in quiet solitude, so I'm trying to appreciate the new moments I have to myself. most of them aren't that interesting though. I stopped taking my phone to the bathroom. I have to sit by people in the cafeteria - although I usually did before.

I look around the office breakroom while my lunch is microwaving. Today I had to search far for an open microwave, and that breakroom had a printed sign on the fridge that said "DO NOT USE ITEMS IN THE REFRIGERATOR THAT DO NOT BELONG TO YOU (THIS INCLUDES MUSTARD)"

of course I was like oh man that's funny I should take a picture with my phone and post it on reddit but eh, no phone, and even if I did have it, no reddit. then another guy came in to use the microwave after me and I was going to ask if he thought it was funny but he was on his phone.

most of the time my life isn't that different. I don't *feel* an extra 15 hours a week yet. but it's early.

Troubleshooting is a beautiful art.

One professor in college said it "could not be taught", that you were either born with "the knack" or you weren't - there's a related dilbert cartoon. But once I started engineering I realized that there are definitely techniques that not only can be taught, but SHOULD and AREN'T, and if you think troubleshooting is something genetic you might be a STEM gatekeeper.

The other thing I've realized is that technical troubleshooting is closely related to the old fashioned Scientific Method we used to have on posters in our elementary school classroom. When did engineers decide we were "practical" and therefore not scientists? There are a few versions of the method, but most go along the lines of:

1) State the problem
2) Do your research
3) Hypothesize
4) Experiment
5) Analyze
6) Write down your results

In my engineering life, these translate really well to...

1) State the problem. Yes, that, you'd be surprised how often we don't get a good description of the problem, an airplane lands and the pilot gets off and says "this autopilot sucks". That is not a good problem statement. "We were flying along straight and level and suddenly the autopilot pitched us straight down at the ground, spun us into a barrel roll then disconnected and called us names" gives us something to work with.

2) Do your research. When I'm overwhelmed my favorite thing is just to start printing stuff out. Someone says there's an issue with a weird part I've never heard of? print the spec sheet. print the wire diagram and get out my colored pencils. History can be an extremely important part of research. When did this problem start happening? What changed? These are especially important when chasing down intermittent issues, the dreaded "could not duplicate" that keep us awake weeks after the event.

I have a silly step 2a during this phase and that's "stay hydrated". I realize this does not sound technical at all but really it only takes a second and the benefits of drinking water help with so many other things, you're dooming yourself if you can't channel the necessary mental energy into a task for some silly physical reason.

3) Hypothesize/experiment/analyze - these can go pretty quickly together in troubleshooting. Research gives you your hypothesis... you don't think about ways a system can work, you read the way the system SHALL work. Then you can experiment. My favorite metaphor is the joke artists make, that to carve an elephant you start with a big slab of marble and chip away everything that's not an elephant. In troubleshooting, you find little parts of the system that are working, and eventually get yourself to the bit that's not working.

Of course in engineering we do have some trusty go-to experiments:
3a) Make sure everything is plugged in
3b) Try turning it off and then back on again
3c) "Percussive maintenance"

4) WRITE YOUR SHIT DOWN OMG! Engineering schools and math classes try to get students to show their work but it's never enough. Write down the exact results! Not "the resistance was within tolerance" but EXACTLY what it was, in ohms, in a table, forever. Then I knew you checked it. A lot of troubleshooting is done in teams where we want to trust each other but we've all learned from experience to never trust anyone. "Believe half of what you see and nothing that you hear," said a favorite specialist I work with.

I'd like to add another important last step... accept your paths. Never beat yourself up. If an issue took four days to solve, be happy it didn't take eight. Even if it's a tiny "obvious" silly thing, and it frequently is, and those are the ones where we feel the worst. At the end of the day the important thing is whether you learned something new, stuck to the problem and found the answer.

I am convinced now that a "technical person" is not someone with the right genes, just perseverance. We find a starting point even if we've already found 500 starting points that didn't work. Our job is to never run out of ideas. We don't freeze up. When things go badly we can try another approach, take a break, or ask for help. The best "troubleshooters" do not have a divine power to lay their hands on a machine and heal it. They know a LOT, so they don't have to spend as much time doing research to understand expected results we should get from expected inputs, and that's great. Maybe they've got a bank in their head of past issues, and that's great too. But we can all get there.

Be thoughtful. Ask questions.

(Stay hydrated!)

I've been slogging through "Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations" by Thomas L. Friedman... I think I'm going to throw it to the side unfinished.

It's just going on and on about how great technology is because the world is changing so fast, we are instantly connected to each other, data transmission and storage has gone so much faster. Moore's law, github, open source, semi-conductors, intel, 3G, 4G, 8G whatever, and now we can add sensors to create the internet of things and track the exact time we should fertilize cows so nobody has to think anymore because machines will do all the work and the world is awesome!

I still think back a lot on this coffee maker we bought about a year ago. We splurged on a "nice" new coffee maker. About three weeks after we bought it I went to make coffee and couldn't... it wouldn't drip, it just went BEEP BEEP BEEP and a light went on that said it had to be cleaned. So I googled and followed instructions to clean it and inserted a new filter but nothing worked. It still said it had to be cleaned.

When you want coffee, and all you get is a machine going BEEP BEEP BEEP, you start thinking about murder.

So we returned it and bought the simplest coffee maker we could find, with just a single on off switch, and kept our camping french press out for backup.

If the world is so amazing, why is it sometimes so awful?

My liberal friends would say it's fucking capitalism, giving companies the incentive to push out disposable crap. I returned that coffee maker. It may very well have gone straight to the landfill. Those same liberal friends would say that the mark of good technology is free time, if the world was really progressing we'd all be down to 20 hour work weeks. We're not thinking about people enough.

My mechanic friends, who happen to be conservatives, would say it's idiots. Some idiots think we can use computers that nobody understands to enable any idiot to make coffee, but since the designers are idiots too, the coffee maker is shit. Good technology is only achievable when we listen to experts and users, run tests, and hear people out when they're frustrated. Embrace our human side and quit taking shortcuts! Oddly enough, they'd also say we're not thinking about people enough.

Maybe I should have been more persistent, talked to the company who made my coffee maker (I can't even remember it now) and ask them what they thought of the bad reviews. Or maybe I should never have bought it in the first place. I do know that moore's law and putting chips in everything and making the world "smart" has sometimes made it worse. Use your power for good, or for evil. Like all power.

Well this hit a little close to home... Why Gen Z Loves Closed Captioning: Old technology finds a surprising new application

summary: Originally designed for the hearing impaired, closed captions are extremely popular among young people with focus problems who'd rather multitask than pay attention and listen to words people are saying.

As an 80s baby I don't know what gen Z is or whatever terms the kids these days are using, but I love closed captioning. I don't like the TV to be turned up very loud, it stresses me, so I kind of like it hard to hear. Then there's family/kids/dog/street noise that makes me miss things. With closed captioning I just don't have to worry about it.

I have to work very hard to listen to people. My mind wanders off. At work it's a challenge. So now I wonder if closed captioning is just one more thing training me to not listen?

I took a mindfulness course about a year ago, I don't remember. We practiced bringing our whole focus to one simple thing in the room. It helped, my mind felt very clear, but dang it the world has so many things to think about.

man, if you want to start a fierce facebook debate, bring up self-checkouts at grocery stores!

I use them. I admit they are not perfect. It is stupid how much they want to yell at you for "stealing" when you're obviously right there trying to check out. As my husband once said looking around, "If I wanted to steal from this place, I'd steal from this place." I am sure they were programmed by someone who hates technology and doesn't trust it and just dreams up worst-case scenarios that some poor IT guy has to jump through just to get his project done.

I like how I can go to a store at oh-dark-thirty in the morning with a pocket full of spare change and shove pennies at it until I've paid for my peanut butter cups. I wouldn't do that to a human cashier, they would roll their eyes at me and not want to count all that change, and they'd be in the right.

Let's get to my real rant though - old people on facebook who say we should not use self-checkout because JOBS. Robots TAKING human JOBS! Don't you care about the poor cashiers getting tossed out on the street because they've been made obsolete by technology?

What a strange argument. I have not heard any news interviews about people who wanted to be cashiers but could not because grocery stores are hiring fewer workers. They still need people to monitor the machines. They've never hired enough cashiers to make my checkout experience queue-free... if they're going to have just 2-3 working at a time, why not have one of them monitor a self-checkout with six stations so I don't have to wait? Same number of employed people, less waiting.

And even if they weren't hiring cashiers... well, jobs go obsolete! When I get into facebook debates with these people I ask them about other obsolete jobs they could feel bad about...

- when you want to find a business' contact information do you call information, or just google it?
- to type this facebook status, did you hire a typing pool?
- did you request an elevator operator, or hit the 9th floor button yourself?

These are all things people used to do, but with a little technology help, the jobs went away and now we are all "burdened" with doing these jobs "ourselves" - but I'm not sure we'd go back. And we don't feel bad. If the self-checkouts keep improving, why should I just stand and stare off into space while a human person does my scanning for me? I'm just standing there bored, it's not like this costs me time.

At the end of the day we have to ask ourselves how to move the world FORWARD, and clinging to the past is never the solution to that. Humans will always be needed. The biggest tech companies in the world employ hundreds of thousands of people - tech companies! If robots could replace us, they'd figure it out, right? So if you're worried about cashiers, look for ways to find people jobs where their human talents are put to worthy use - aka jobs that we can't program a computer to do. Fight for higher wages. Fight for efficiencies to make our lives easier, so we can work fewer hours a week and still have what we need.

Trying to freeze the world because the touchscreen is glitchy is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's a real enemy here but technology is not it.

Previously on spacefem's livejournal...

I talked about teaching laser cutter design classes and the struggles of getting a general slice of the public to do a series of tasks on their individual computers. I wrote that I "Encouraged people to spy on their neighbors to make sure we're all on the same step, since we've all got to get there together. This didn't work like I hoped. It basically didn't work at all."

Anyway I wanted to publicly thank randomdreams for this comment:

I suspect that unless you somehow enforce people checking on their neighbors, like only giving every other person a computer and having them share, you're not going to get that at all because it's inherently a space violation.

Giving every other person a computer would force them to work together as "partners"... hmmm. So it gave me an idea. At the next class, I still gave everyone a computer but told them they had to be arranged in pairs, two laptops together. No rows of three in the classroom... only rows of two or four. And now you have a partner. Meet your partner. Say hi to your partner.

Guess what? It worked out AWESOME!

For some reason, telling people to check on their left and right neighbor had no effect, but telling people they had a partner was radically different. They worked together through the steps. Some partner pairs took off on their own, but together they were less likely to miss stuff, which was happening a lot when people individually took off on their own. There was a significant reduction in me getting called over for individual help and an significant reduction in anyone falling 12 steps behind and not saying anything.

I'm not sure I totally understand the psychology of it but it was such a good class I'm now thinking I can increase the size and reduce our backlog of people wanting to take it and I'm really thrilled. YAY!

There's this meme going around in some groups I'm in for moms who just had babies. It says to get your baby an email address, and send her little notes every few months. Then when she's 18, give her the password.

All the moms in my groups post the collective "awwwe!!!!" reply to the idea, I'm the nerd who can't get along who says "we'll still be using EMAIL in 18 years?"

So that would mean Olive would get to read all these little notes from me in the year 2031. Think about that.

Granted, email has made it 18 years. If your baby was born in 1996, you might giving her a password to... something, I don't know what. That was Hotmail's first year so unless you were a VERY early adopter, you probably had an email through your ISP. Maybe some old fogie nerd reading this can help me understand what was around back in the day.

Maybe I just hope email won't last another 18 years though... because it sucks. I swear 99.9% of it has to be spam. One asshole running alone can fill up your inbox with giant attachments galore. Gmail tried to prioritize it, but now I'm missing stuff because it "misses" some things that are really important. dammit. passwords get lost, passwords get hacked. abandoned accounts get purged. or forgotten about entirely.

So I think I'm going to stick with my plan for saved communications - once a year I use ljbook to download my livejournal to a PDF, then I print it with lulu. Not perfect. If we have a house fire it'll all be gone. But at least livejournal is still around, I've been here over ten years. Maybe that's what 2031 will be like... just me, the last American on livejournal.

If anyone here can predict the future and tell me a way to send my child notes that's more reliable than paper, I'm all ears. Until then I'll just see if this gets to her:

Dear precious baby Olive: You're 18! Go play the lottery and buy some porn, you adult you! Then get back to class and keep working on those scholarships, what do you think I am made of money?

Love, Mommy in 2014