PJH Studios

Category: Technology

Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.

  • The weight of data

    All that data that we’re collecting and using, what does it all mean? It requires context and a human element. An excellent TEDx talk by Jer Thorp.

  • Kaggle and data prediction competitions

    Competitions, where all things being equal, brings out the best results. Nine players on a baseball diamond work through nine innings against nine other players. Open bidding for contracts in response to a proposal to meet a business problem puts companies against each other for the best solution.

    Kaggle is a competition market where players (yes, they call participants players) build the best predictive data model for a problem. In one case, individuals created a model to predict auto collisions nearly 3.5 times better than Allstate’s own models. An ongoing competition is seeking to predict health care admittances. That’s powerful stuff.

  • Bell Labs and innovation

    Bell Labs brought us into the future, making science fiction science fact. This is all due to forcing people to interact.

    ONE element of his approach was architectural. He personally helped design a building in Murray Hill, N.J., opened in 1941, where everyone would interact with one another. Some of the hallways in the building were designed to be so long that to look down their length was to see the end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.

    This comes from John Gertner’s forthcoming book, [amazon_link id=”1594203288″ target=”_blank” ]The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation[/amazon_link]

  • Review of Doxie Go scanner

    It seems too good to be true, a wireless, portable scanner that can send documents to your computer or iOS device. Perfect for one’s office within a Starbucks. Kind of.

    Measuring a foot long, two inches tall and about 3 inches deep, weighing in at less than a half a pound, the Doxie Go is definitely portable. It powers on to a default scan mode of 300 dpi and can be toggled to 600 dpi, if needed. The power button can easily be erroneously pushed, too. Paper (photos, too) get scanned face side up, and the scanner gently pulls the item through, saving the scanned item within its on board memory or an SD card that you can add. The scanner seems fickle when pulling the item through.  If the item isn’t lined up perfectly, or you hold on to the paper a moment more, the Doxie Go doesn’t scan. Also, if the paper goes in angled or as it goes through and the paper catches on a random object on your desk, the resulting scan is a trippy blur of digital LSD. And don’t even bother with wrinkled or worn paper–vending machines take crumpled money better. Ideally, you’re scanning a relatively flat piece of paper and you either have a very clean desk or surface to scan on or you guide the paper through, catching it so it doesn’t get caught on any stray pens or keyboard.

    The catch, for wireless scanning, is you have to add the wireless capability yourself with an [amazon_link id=”B004U5QR62″ target=”_blank” ]Eye-Fi wireless SD card[/amazon_link]. So in a sense, it is wireless, but to get the scans off it, out of the box, it’s not.

    Oh. OK.

    Otherwise, to get your scans off the device, you must connect the Doxie to your computer via a mini USB cable,use a thumb drive, or, in the case of non-Eye-Fi SD cards, a memory card reader. Then, to do anything with the scans, processing through the Doxie software is required.

    The software is free and actually pleasant to use.  Before your first use, the Doxie requires a setup procedure. To note, the Doxie Go I received needed a full charge before using. Setup is painless. To import the scans, select import, and the scans will be moved to your computer within a Doxie application directory.

    The quality of the scans is quite good at 300 dpi, usable and the equivalent of a very good, clean fax machine. Scans can be saved to JPG, PNG, PDF, PDF with OCR (object character recognition) in black and white or color. Images scanned OK to good.  Scan images that have a purpose, e.g. labels, clips from magazines, and don’t necessarily have to be reproduced.

    Each scan can be tweaked for clarity and contrast via several sliders (see screen shot below). A neat feature, to group scans, like a 10 page legal form, you select the 10 related pages (make sure they’re in the order you want them). One lacking feature is the ability to zoom in on a document. Legal forms look the same, and distinguishing them was a challenge in Doxie’s software.

    doxie editing controls

    Battery life seemed to be less than I expected.  I’d only get about two dozen scans out of it across several weeks. It comes with a mini USB cable, carrying case, which is a black bag, a calibration card, a guide in which to place 4″x6″ images and some random dongle that I have no clue as to what its purpose is.  I never go the Eye-Fi to work properly with the Doxie Go, despite several attempts. If Eye-Fi can put a wireless transmitter in something the size of an SD card, why couldn’t the engineers at Apparent put a wifi transmitter on their device to begin with? Would it really raise the price more than the additional $80 it costs for the Eye-Fi?

    If you’re regularly out of your office and need to scan a document or three, the Doxie Go will work. Pass on it, if your multifunction printer already has this capability or own a flatbed scanner.

  • Autoplay on the web is rage inducing

    Go to the grocery store. Grab your shopping cart, carefully choosing the one with four squeak less wheels. Liesurley browse for bananas, add the box of Cheerios, select the pepper jack cheese that’s on sale (bonus!). Now, browse to the frozen food section. Scan the frosty shel-.

    “HEY THERE SHOPPER. BUY SOME O’ THIS GOOD FROZEN ICE CREAM.”

    Shocked, you’re now either at best surprised, or at worst, angry, and if anything, annoyed at the unexpected interruption. For all the media encountered during the day, you think you’d be desensitized to these random bouts of advertorial extroversion.

    Websites do this constantly. Videos auto play. Advertising attempts to do something clever. The granddaddy of them all, the pop up, still makes an appearance. These are all hostile interruptions to the user and moreover, disrespect the site’s content.

    On YouTube or a music site, you expect something to automatically start. On news pages, where there’s only a video story, that’s expected as well.  On a news page with video and a text story, the video should not auto play. If they do, why so damn loud?

    The solution, which publishers are in an arms race with, are browser plugins that disable auto play and other forms of advertising. Users get fed up with the interruptions and unruly, distracting advertising and install the plugins, which then the publishers seek to find a different way to make money off the users accessing the content.

  • Pinterest is the new women’s magazine

    I picked up my mother’s copy of Women’s Day.  Thumbing through a few pages I read about dinner (and cookie) recipes, household tips, clever pop culture items, quick style blurbs and general interest items.

    Scrolling Pinterest’s front page, I spy a recipe for a sugary confection, photos of style “looks”, make up tips, pictorial witticisms, photos of cool things to make or do around the house.

    Women’s Day, the paper magazine, is social to the extent of giving the magazine to someone or clipping out an article and physically sharing it.  Pinterest is social as simple as finding something you like and pinning it for anyone one to view.

     

  • Twitter Stories

    Twitter splendidly presents stories of tweets or clever uses of its service in Twitter Stories. A guy who saved his mother’s book store. Fishermen who sell the day’s catch while still on the boat. Complete recipes in 140 characters. Twitter is finding a singular purpose–enabling people to communicate uniquely and directly to the entire world, no filter needed.

  • Review of the Star Telegram iPad app

    Summary: The Star Telegram app is functional app that delivers content well, but restricts and undervalues the content. Pros: great value, photos look great, environmentally friendly, solid delivery of content. Cons: You’re reading a PDF at first, inconsistent browsing behaviors, the power of the iPad is underutilized, download times vary.

    Price: The app is free, with $2/month for print subscribers, $7.99/month, $75/year. This seems like a fair value, or an outright deal if you crunch the numbers compared to buying a paper a day or even subscribing to the print edition. Upon opening the app, you’ll need to sign in to download editions. If you have a Star Telegram Account, you can do this, and add subscriptions to your account, or you can purchase a one month subscription from within the app.

    Star Telegram iPad app first screen

    The physical layout is the paper layout–familiar but outdated. The iPad can richly deliver text, images and video, with unique behavioral interactions, yet the content remains constrained to a print layout. You cannot select text in this “paper” format. Pictures are vibrant and crisp and benefit the most from the app–no more misaligned color plates or inconsistent coloring ruining photos. Personally, I’d like to see a behavior to zoom in on images or make them full screen. Text is crisp similar to a well formatted PDF, but has to rejigger itself every time you zoom in and out. This is a disadvantage of constraining a print format within a digital format.

    Depending on the amount of content in the paper for the day will determine how long it takes to download the day’s edition. Mondays take about 2 minutes, while Sundays take nearly 10 minutes over a high speed internet connection. [This was done at home over a Uverse broadband connection, with the iPad connected wirelessly.] Ads remain prominent, and in Sunday editions, most advertising inserts are not included–very limited set of coupons, no store inserts such as Best Buy ad, etc. Yet the Parade insert is included.

    Navigation/Interaction

    Initial navigation is to read the paper, a PDF-like image of the paper

    • Swipe or touch translucent blue tabs to change pages
    • Pinch and expand to zoom out/zoom in, respectively
    • Single click on an article to zoom in on it
    • Double clicking on an article will bring up a native text format article, where text size can be changed larger or smaller for readability and copied. You can browse to other text articles via the up and down arrows on the menu. Can also share via email, Facebook or Twitter. The email sharing crashed the app for me, and the Facebook and Twitter sharing worked as expected, where you sign in, or authorize, the ST app to use the respective service to share the app.

    Re: Facebook sharing. Why, WHY, does the Star Telegram app need “my name, profile picture, gender, networks, list of friends and any other information I’ve shared with anyone?” I could very easily go to the site, copy the equivalent link for the story and then paste it into Facebook. I refused.

    Re: Twitter sharing. Very straight forward, The tweet turns into something like, “Check out this article: (headline) (Bitly shortlink),” which you can edit before posting.

    There is no print capability. If you’d like to print out a recipe, or blurb, it might be best to go to the Star Telegram site and print it. (Or email it to yourself, if the email function works for you.)

    Menu

    • Can browse 7 days of back issues
      st_app_screens 6 Star Telegram iPad app issue browser  
    • Can bookmark articles for later reading
    • Can search the current paper
    • Three ways to browse sections

    A. Drop down menu of sections, includes a count of news stories within that section. Touch a section and a list of stories will appear. Touch a headline, and the behavior of the app will take you to the “paper” view of the story, not the readable, full text of the story. If you click on a front page article, or a column that jumps to another page, you then have to click again to get to the rest of the article. Why not go to the full article?

    Star Telegram iPad app drop down menu

    B. A series of tabs can be overlaid for each section, and remain there until you go to a text article or choose to make them go away.

    Star Telegram iPad app tab menus

    C. The River of Digital Paper. Take each flat of 2 pages, line them all up in a row, and make them scroll left or right, depending on where you’d like to browse. It’s an interesting way browse, to get a sense of scale and general idea to hop to a section. You can pinch and expand as you would the rest of the paper, however, It’s not very readable. Quite frankly, you can see all the ads and determine how much content there’s in the paper, which seems sad when put in this perspective.

    Star Telegram iPad appriver of digital news

    Misc.

    Blue highlighted text is clickable–email, websites, phone numbers, in both the paper and text versions of the articles.

    If app is minimized, or closed, and reopened, it will take you back to where you were. If a day passes, the app will take you to the front page for that day.

    Other tests

    Out of curiosity, I did an airplane test, or what can I do without an internet connection test. It appears, if you’d like to read the Star Telegram iPad app without a connection, you must first connect and download the edition you’d like. That makes sense. However, you’re limited to the “paper” version. You cannot double click to get a text formatted article. Not horrible, but slightly disappointing.

    Also, I did a Mom test. I handed the iPad to my mother, and asked her to browse the paper. For the most part, she figured it out, but there were two hang ups. The Search icon is a magnifying glass, which to her meant to zoom in. She wanted to zoom but didn’t get it. Perhaps a different icon would help? Secondly, once she found the text version of the article, she tried to swipe left and right to the next articles. This is inconsistent with what you’d do in the paper version. Why make the behaviors different?

    Potential and final thoughts

    I’ve lived in Fort Worth for nearly 12 years, and remember the Star Telegram as a content rich paper, with numerous features and news articles. In those 12 years, it’s devolved into a shell for sparse local coverage and wire service articles. Have you picked up a Monday paper in a while? It’s sad, kind of like seeing a loved one lose too much weight to the point they look unhealthy.

    The iPad app is a healthy boost for the content, but I can’t help feel it’s restricting the content they wish to provide. Here’s a device that 12 years ago existed in the fantasy of science fiction, yet, is being treated as a digital microfiche viewer, you know, those bulky boxes where you’d put a film slide of newspaper over a light and you could view it. At the time, that was a great way to share archives of newspapers. Today, treating your content as microfiche film undervalues it.

    Make it rich, make it interactive, get out of the grid of a print layout. Why can’t advertising go to the sponsor’s website (business opportunity!)? Why can’t Amazon affiliate links go into content (business opportunity!)? Why can’t trailers (or Galloway and Hate videos) be included for movies, books and whatever else (business opportunity!)? Why can’t classifieds be structured differently, ala a Craig’s List, instead of squinty little boxes, a holdover from the 19th century (business opportunity!)? Why can’t daily deals, the Star Telegram equivalent of Groupon (business opportunity!), be integrated? The photos look great, why not add photo stories, ala The Big Picture to focus on the vivid and diverse settings and people of the Metroplex.

    Granted, this is a 1.0 app, and with first versions, you want to get the core feature set right, which, for the most part, they did. The app is functional, and the content is there, and feels much better than the Star Telegram website.

  • What I learned from 46 days of no Facebook

    In keeping with the Catholic tradition of sacrificing something for Lent, I chose to give up Facebook. In the past, I’ve given up chocolate, sweets, dessert, beer, alcohol, caffeine, soda, (listening to) music. Forsaking a technological medium that seeks to connect people, and purposefully disconnecting from it, goes against the instant gratification of modern life. I still had email, cell phone, Twitter, a mail box people could send mail to (I received a postcard during that time). At one point, I consulted with a Lentor, to determine if I could view Facebook at all or just my own account. Consensus deemed that viewing Facebook through others to be OK.

    As an aside, the term Lentor was coined at a birthday dinner when a friend had a question about not swearing. A different friend quickly intervened, heading off any moral quandary and designating himself as a Lentor, one who can determine the applicable boundaries of a Lenten sacrifice. I’m sure a priest could have served the role, but what lay person wouldn’t want to help set some tangible, real world spiritual chalk lines?

    Facebook is pervasive

    If Lenten sacrifices have blurry lines, then Facebook obliterates whatever constraints social communication had. For so long, communication remained tethered to the real world. Written letters, phone communication, voice mails, face to face, text messaging seems fairly grounded in comparison. In casual conversation, referencing Facebook is such a common occurrence that Facebook itself is the communication medium. Yes, its content resides on a digital cloud somewhere in California, but consider:

    “… posted pictures on Facebook…”

    “… on Facebook, [so-and-so] said [funny/stupid/innocuous/inane/sad/maddening comment] on my wall…”

    “… received a Facebook invite for…”

    “… just send me a message on Facebook…”

    “… are you on Facebook?”

    “… you can get our hours of operation on Facebook…”

    “… did you see [so-and-so’s] status on Facebook?”

    [Insert entire recounting of Facebook realm drama here that ultimately makes its way in to every day life.]

    While waiting for someone at Blue Mesa, I overheard two different conversations related to things occurring or having occurred on Facebook. It wasn’t the internet, a blog but a website that, as we all learned from watching the Social Network, put the social experience online. A website that stands to make money off electronic social interactions better than any blog ever did.

    At a birthday party, I joked with an acquaintance that we weren’t officially friends since we weren’t Facebook friends. Since this occurred during Lent, I told her I couldn’t friend her right away.

    “Can it wait until Easter Morning?” I said.

    “Sure, I’ll be expecting a friend request at 12:01, Easter Morning.”

    “What about after sunrise service?”

    The Fear Of Missing Out

    Facebook makes us more connected in a passive way, making it easy to see photos, updates and changes in people’s lives. It also accentuates something that’s always existed–the fear of missing out. That sense of anxiety when there’s something out there that we’d like to experience but are not able to for some reason or another, often due to simply not being informed.

    In grade school, you’d figure out which birthday party you missed by hearing about it on Monday while hanging out by the monkey bars. Now, someone you don’t even know will upload a photo from a bar while hanging out at a bar with a stuffed monkey in the back room and tag a friend you know, alerting you of fun you never knew existed. Or were invited to.

    The fear of missing out applies to keeping up with status updates and the miscellany of conversation commenting on photos, videos or links. We want to be part of those conversations, even if we’re lurking, passively consuming the updates. What if we miss out on something funny, or engaging or interesting? We want to know. This has been true for any media or form of communication. We’re social creatures, despite however much someone claims to be an introvert. We want to be connected to others and validated by others. I’m guessing there’s some evolutionary biology behind connection and validation. Survival of the species, perhaps?

    Biologically, within your brain, you’re wired to become engaged with novelty, things that interest you. When something interests you (intellectually, emotionally or physically) your body will crank out various hormones to further engage you. Dopamine, adrenaline, oxycontin are a few, and to enjoy those activities more, we need a more novel or bigger hit of those activities. This is why relationships are hard work–the novelty of the initial attraction wears off, and then you have to work at maintaining that attraction.

    And Facebook is an amusement park of attractions, the equivalent of a 100 different roller coasters of digital crack. It’s novel, interesting, engaging, relatively easy to consume and there’s always a reason to come back for more. A good drug dealer gets you hooked with free. All Facebook costs you is time. So a free means to engage passively with social connections leads to all sorts of things, one being the need to keep up with others so you don’t miss out.

    Curated lives

    In keeping up with others, there’s the opposite, informing others. Anyone who posts things to Facebook is a publisher, a modern day William Randolph Hearst, albeit at a much smaller scale, for a much more individual purpose.

    Hearst is credited with saying to a photographer, “You provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war.” Regardless, if he ever said it, the point is that what ever means is used, we can justify the ends to say something. We might not be selectively curating lolcat pictures or YouTube videos for war, but we selectively signal our interests and intentions by what we share or say.

    Travels, growing families, melancholy thoughts, persistent witticisms, innocuous oversharing, politics, sports, gossip, social causes, personal happenings… Imagine whatever you publish to Facebook as a room in your own personal gallery. What’s that gallery going to look like? Curators discern what hangs on the wall at a museum with subject matter smarts and an intent to editorialize to show or say something.

    Wouldn’t your Facebook postings do the same?

    You know yourself (you should), and you want to tell people something, and you choose what you want to say.

    You’re curating your own life. And we each have our own reasons for doing that.

    Offline

    But what about those that don’t reside on Facebook, or never post anything beyond setting up their page with a picture and basic information? I don’t think they’re missing out, despite the pervasiveness and growing necessity to communicate via Facebook. They have their ways of keeping in touch, getting whatever social interaction floats their boat and living life how they want to. Meaningful lives can still be lived without Liking or Statusing or Poking or Inviting or Messaging. Meaningful lives can still be lived with conversations, however infrequent they may occur. Meaningful lives are not defined by the content or quantity of Facebook updates.

  • The story of Z. Vex effects pedals

    Z. Vex creates handmade and painted guitar effects pedals, a business that started as a hobby.

    Vex: “My first Z.Vex pedal was an improvement on an Apollo Fuzz-Wah fuzz, which was the Octane. I showed it to Nate at Willie’s American Guitars in St. Paul and he immediately ordered three. I hadn’t planned on going into business, it just happened by accident. I started making a living within about two months after the pedal company started. A meager living, but a living. I believe my apartment was about $300 a month.”