hutaffe.blog

Barcelona this week for some business stuff… It’s been a while since I’ve been here, but I still like it a lot!

I think the way TV manufacturers select their product names is by choosing a random WiFi password of any manager on the development team. Or they just have a fancy random number/letter combination generator.

Instabuy! BBEdit 13 arrives, with new grep features and dark mode support - Six Colors

It’s autumn! Went to a lovely small festival at a farm today.

Spent a nice, relaxed weekend with some old friends in Prague. You know you have good people around you when you didn’t see each other for several years and after a casual HI! it feels like nothing has changed. It’s a lovely city, but it really suffers from the masses of tourists and everything that comes with it. It seems like there’s no life outside of tourism anymore. Because of the type of tourism it feels even worse then Venice! (No picture because it’s impossible to get a quick shot without literally thousands of people in it)

Today we are connected with vast stocks of knowledge and yet have not learned to think.

• James Bridle, New Dark Age

Funny that this is something people think might lead to impeachment. Feels like there were many more issues with better chances before. I have no idea about this stuff, but if I learned something during the last few years is that the world shouldn’t hope for a time without Trump for a long long, loooong time.

I guess this is an example that shows why we should be thankful for System Integrity Protection. 512pixels.net - Group of Mac Pros in Hollywood Affected by Reboot Bug. Also, what does a Browser have to do to destroy an entire file system?!

Ich kann gar nicht in Worte fassen wie wütend mich diese faule und ignorante Politik macht. Das Schlimmere ist noch, dass die Bevölkerung das vermutlich zu großen Teilen immer noch für unnötig und zu viel hält. Das wird nichts mehr.

Klimapaket… was ein Witz. Ein sinnloser Rohrkrepierer von A bis Z ist das. Deutsche Politik ohne Zukunftssinn, -Plan und -Perspektive. Traurig ist das was die da veranstalten.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that developers need to think about the CO2 impact their solutions have. You can (roughly) calculate the footprint of a MB of data that’s transferred. Constantly polling an API with lots of data? Nobody cares about the size of an app package anymore? Think about how much CO2 is emitted when only a couple thousand people download an app that includes huge amounts of unnecessary images or tracking and advertising libraries that constantly generate traffic. How many websites are bloated with ridiculous amounts of ads, tracking, auto-playing videos. It’s not just that this is annoying to the users.

We stream everything nowadays… music, videos, apps, games, news. Depending on the scale of your solution, this amounts to a significant portion of power that needs to be generated for data storage, servers and transfer.

The Internet is already responsible for more CO2 emissions than worldwide air traffic. Let’s start taking this into consideration when building software and services.

I saw a short report about the CO2 footprint of internet usage on TV yesterday. I knew this is a thing, but somehow it didn’t make it to full consciousness until now. Need to think about this a bit. Here’s a nice project showing how much CO2 is emitted by Google every second 😕

🎶 Back around the time when I lived in Sweden for a year, Mando Diao was my favorite band… by far! The last couple of albums were disappointing, but the first songs on the new album coming in October are quite promising! This makes me really happy 😌

Here we go! It’s bare metal, just what I expected. But what’s there is just fine and works surprisingly well. I know what I went into… freedom, privacy, openness… no apps and a few bugs 😉 Maybe I‘ll try to find out how to support development with this.

Playing around with Android on my „new“ OnePlus One before I install Ubuntu Touch on it. This device is more than 5 years old but it feels really snappy. More than enough power for a normal user.

I didn’t read the whole thing, neither on Daring Fireball nor the article in the New York Times, because quite frankly I don’t care about the details. But while skimming over it, I saw this quote from the article:

The entire event is at odds with our current moment — one in which inequality, economic precarity and populist frustration have infiltrated our politics and reshaped our relationships with once-adored tech companies. But it’s not just the tech backlash. When the world feels increasingly volatile and fragile, it feels a little obscene to gather to worship a $1,000 phone. […]

This 100% describes my current feelings. It’s exactly what all my grumbling about the tech industry lately is about. That’s where the focus of this discussion should be. It’s not like nobody should have any fun anymore or shouldn’t enjoy their gadgets. Good for them! But it really often looks like worshipping. Apple bloggers are defensive here and I agree to some of the arguments from the NYT (again, didn’t read the whole thing). I also understand John Gruber and also Jason Snell here. It’s their job to report about this stuff, and they do probably the very best job in this field, also from a journalistic point of view. They mostly are objective, but sometimes I also get the feeling that they are a little apologetic in some cases.

My point is this: Nobody cares if people are willing to spend obscene amounts of money to get a new toy each year. What I care about is that there are way more important issues in this world, and tech companies are doing nothing against it. What they do is marketing and greenwashing at best. They have money, they have power. They should do something better with it.

While learning Python I found out that there are a couple of fun easter eggs in the language itself. Something that makes it even more compelling somehow. It’s not harmful to show a little whimsy, even in a programming language.

Besides the import antigravity link, the Zen of Python isn’t just fun, it also teaches you about the foundations of Python and programming in general:

>>> import this The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch. Now is better than never. Although never is often better than right now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. Namespaces are one honking great idea – let’s do more of those!

This is a great source for a couple of more advanced techniques when learning Python. One of the better programming books I`ve read…

Home-home for the weekend.

No, YouTube. I still won’t subscribe to your Premium service, even if you ask me another 3 billion times.

Trying to get an old OnePlus One on eBay to try out Ubuntu Touch. Curious how this will work… I think it’s is an interesting project and worthwhile to support their mission. Linux is far out in this game, but iOS and Android could need some competition.

Once again considering to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year. I wrote almost 6000 words for myself during the last couple of days. Should be doable if I can find the time for it. But I also have no idea at all about what I would want to write then.

This might just be another brain fart and/or a moment of madness (maybe even sadness?), but considering what’s going on in this world, the products Apple builds and the audience they are built for… I think I’m backing out of this business. When I look around me, when I read the news or watch reports on TV, I see a degressive world in pain with problems getting worse each day. I just can’t reconcile all of this with my conscience. Sitting here, building meaningless stuff without the purpose to at least try to improve even small things in this world. I’m not the one saving the world, but I can maybe help a little. Everyone can construct a meaning in what they do. But I don’t want to construct it, I want to actually do something more meaningful.

Apple has all the money in the world, and I acknowledge that they might be one of the few companies that at least try to do things more conscious and sustainable. But that’s not enough. The actions they take don’t help the world as a whole. Yes, they build a watch that seems to save lives and makes people live healthier. And I’d argue that this is the most important product they offer at the moment. All their products are great in some way, and I still think they’re the best in what they do. I don’t condemn them for their work. But the way their products are marketed and to whom… there are so many features I don’t think anyone really needs. Those resources (time, money, effort, ideas…) could be spent to make the world a better place to live for our children. Are lots of cameras on the back of a telephone saving our climate? Probably not. Are workers in Asia suffering because some rich kid of Instagram makes money by taking stupid selfies with an insanely expensive electronic device? Probably yes. Do I want to build productivity apps for rich people to squeeze another minute a day out of their precious time they need to optimize themselves, or do I try to create something that actually helps for real?

Times are changing, the world is changing, I am changing. And I need to put my energy in something more worthwhile. Whatever that may be. At least at this moment I don’t see myself in this ecosystem anymore.

Here’s a phone that’s cheap and actually built under fair conditions. Just sayin’…

Curious what the new „phones“ will cost this year. I guess the greatest design and functionality is reached when nobody can buy it anymore because it cost 3000$ plus 1000$ for the optional display.