fatmixx

Because you shouldn't need to understand somebody's language to understand their value or their culture's value.

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:59:04 -0500

I love Josh Johnson - he is, easily, one of the best comics out there today. I also really love the Bad Bunny halftime show. I’ve watched it nearly a dozen times at this point, mostly just to enjoy it, but also sometimes to analyze it, and sometimes to appreciate the camerawork and create & technical genius that made it possible.

Josh Johnson posted a video yesterday with his take on the halftime show. It’s funny, it’s touching, and it’s eye-opening. The full video is below, but I want to highlight one portion (starting at about 22:54):

And then you see Bad Bunny after he dances with Gaga, sings — this dude does like a trust fall off the top of the building and gets caught by the people underneath him. As far as symbols and images go, that’s a pretty amazing one for your community always having your back. You know? It was really cool to watch.

That was one of the biggest complaints that people had: “I didn’t understand a word that he said.” And I don’t know, this is just my take, but I really do think that it’s important that Bad Bunny did the show the way that he did it, that there were no subtitles or anything. Because you shouldn’t need to understand somebody’s language to understand their value or their culture’s value. You shouldn’t need to know exactly what they’re saying, because one of the best and coolest things that Bad Bunny did is he just showed — even though the imagery calls for something very dark — he showed how beautiful all that culture is, all over the Latin world, all over North and Central and South America.

And it’s a very important image to watch, seeing all these people. Because whenever you’re like any minority, usually when you’re on a big stage or it’s time for, you know, Oscar nominations and everything, the stories that get told about different groups are usually just about tragedy. It’s usually like, bad. You know? How much can you make us feel with all of your pain? It’s a very different direction to go to only show joy, to only show family, to only show this beautiful blossoming culture. Things that people feel like only they understand, only they see, that are never really on a world stage.

It’s definitely a choice. I think it was the right choice, because when you watch something like that, you see something that you can’t possibly combat. You see that these are the people — these people dancing right now, these people having this wonderful time, these people getting married, these people just expressing joy to the highest degree — these are the people being terrorized. These are the people being hunted and harassed by ICE. These are the people being locked up. It’s these people. For one, you don’t see any monsters on that stage. You don’t see any criminals on that stage. You see regular, beautiful people, and those regular beautiful people are the people who have to stress every single day about their own government coming after them.

You know, so many times people have said, “Why couldn’t an American do the halftime show?” Never mind the fact that Puerto Rico — I can’t stop saying it, because the thing that Freudian slip should tell you is that it was always about culture and race. It was never actually about someone being an American. You know?

The rest is amazing, it’s funny, and it’s thoughtful. Worth a watch.

Now “kiss my fish” is stuck in my head.

The cleanest desk setup

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 19:48:26 -0500

Scott Yu-Jan’s videos have been an inspiration from the beginning of my 3D printing journey, going back years now. He’s a brilliant designer and content creator with a clear communication style and a minimalist aesthetic that really appeals to me, even though I am a bit of a clutterbug on my workspaces.

He has a series called Dream Setups that has rekindled a desire to dig out my printer (and maybe pursue some of the upgrades I’ve been delaying!).

The latest video contains a number of really awesome ideas for minimizing the visual clutter of his desk while maintaining all the functionality and required accessories for his work, including multiple cameras, batteries, chargers, headphones, etc. It’s impressive and gave me a few ideas for my own space. Worth a watch:

Very clean, very functional.

"The internet can be magic!"

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 14:58:44 -0500

By the power of the Instagram algorithm gods, I have recently stumbled across a small club/bar¹ in Brisbane, Australia called The Family Tree. I am now kind of obsessed and want to visit if I’m ever down in Australia. One clip in particular started me down the rabbit hole:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared on Instagram

That transition is absolute 🔥. Executed brilliantly, and it introduced me to that slow flip of Benny Benassi’s Satisfaction, which is a timeless classic². In any case, sharing that they have full sets on their YouTube channel. The DJ in that clip, NAT4SHA, has some great stuff on YouTube and on her Soundcloud.

This recent set has two sections that are absolutely fun - the video should start at the first moment and if you let it play for 5-10 minutes, you should end up on another awesome transition from a little Satisfaction teaser to an afrobeat track that pulled me down another music rabbit hole, Shake Body by Nigerian artist Skales. Both Shake Body and the Satisfaction flip by have made my work-in-progress 2025 Fall playlist³.

Here’s the set at that initial cue point:

Enjoy!

I’m still honestly not sure what it is - the tag line is “Brisbanes Home For Global Club Sounds” so I’m going to just call it a club. ↩︎
Satisfaction also had a cheeky, very NSFW video to go with it, if you’re old enough to remember - or capable enough to google it. Even the cover is on the nose! ↩︎
The Satisfaction flip is NOT in the Apple Music version of my playlist as it’s not available on Apple Music. You’ll need to search Beatport or whatever other sources you like for Satisfaccion Bootleg Remix by DJ Otto, Marcos Jungle, and DJ Kem. Satsifaccion slow worked to help me, IIRC. ↩︎

"American politics has sides... But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project"

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 21:09:31 -0500

After the murder of Charlie Kirk, the US has entered a dangerous new era for political violence. We’ve seen January 6th, attempts on Trump, the assassinations of Melissa Hortman and her husband, and attempted murder of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, the firebombing of Governor Josh Shapiro’s home, and the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband over the past 4 years. This is unhealthy.

Ezra Klein wrote a column the day after Kirk’s assassination that received a lot of pushback. The title alone rankled many, including me: “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” Kirk left a troubling legacy of bigotry and lies behind - Ta Nahesi Coates has a good rundown (paywall) of the many horrible things he said in the pursuit of his politics.

At the core of what Ezra Klein wrote, though, is this idea that we must decide if we want to be a country. If so, we must have more than zero tolerance for those that disagree with us:

American politics has sides. There is no use pretending it doesn’t. But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project — we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment. We can live with losing an election because we believe in the promise of the next election; we can live with losing an argument because we believe that there will be another argument. Political violence imperils that.

Commitment to the American project is everything.

Ezra Klein joined Tim Miller on the Bulwark Podcast recently. I found the conversation hit upon a few ideas I’ve had trouble articulating for myself. It’s a good conversation.

Jon Stewart on Trevor Noah’s What Next? Podcast

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 09:00:48 -0500

If you’re a fan of The Daily Show, or even if you’re just a fan of comedy, you’ll enjoy this conversation between Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah. They cover a wide range of topics, but by far my favorite thing about this is the mutual respect between the two. Jon Stewart talks about how he discovered Trevor Noah, they talk about being introverts, and they talk about how they both think of the world and travel and home. I learned a lot about both men, and got a little insight about the world, as well. Great conversation.

"The government is the place all the problems the private sector won’t solve go"

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 20:46:11 -0500

This conversation between Jon Stewart and Michael Lewis has so many little nuggets and amazing stories that I can’t really pick out an excerpt to quote below. You should stop and listen to the entire thing when you can, all hour and 20 minutes of this, including the post-episode discussion with the producers (which has a hilarious moment about the tush push). I know many people that work in government, and I worked on a government technology project when I was first starting my career. I’ve seen the good and the bad. Michael Lewis’s new book sounds like it does the hard work of showing the kind of people that go into government service. While the stereotype is that government service tends to attract those who couldn’t make it in the private sector, the reality is that many go into government service because they want to serve. The career folks in government service do many amazing things that fly under the radar. I loved this discussion for introducing 3 amazing stories to me, along with a ton of other insights.

Jon Batiste Hears Chappell Roan For The First Time

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 11:58:57 -0500

One of my absolute favorite things in the entire world, a thing that brings me joy no matter my mood, is witnessing artists create - especially if they themselves are having fun in the moment.

Jon Batiste is one of those artists, and the Pianote series with him is one of my favorites ever. The setup is basically that they give him a song he’s never heard before, usually with the music missing - in this case, he hears just vocals and drums from Hot to Go! If you’re a fan of Chappell Roan (and even if you’re not), watch how he cuts right to the heart of the song, and stay until the end to hear a beautiful interpretation of Hot to Go!

"One of the most revolutionary things you can do is just have joy"

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 17:08:08 -0500

I’m going to ignore the horrors of our government right now, instead choosing to highlight this set by Josh Johnson, who is rapidly becoming my favorite new comic. The core of this set, which you can watch for free on YouTube, covers Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, which remains one of the more profound halftime shows I’ve ever seen. Even with my basic familiarity of black history in this country, the layers and depth of the performance were obvious. Josh Johnson breaks it down, makes it funny, and makes it deeply real & meaningful all at the same time. Worth watching the entire thing.

He ends with this:

I think it was incredible. I think it was a phenomenal show especially in a year and a time where there are people that would have black history disappear, you know? There are people that would have us forget. And I think the only way to to stop black history from going away is to make more of it all the time, make new new history all the time, new moments, you know…

Cuz so many people were like man it was so boring I didn’t get it and it’s like, aight, you know, it’s the most watched thing right under the moon landing but… I’m sure that was hate watching, you’re right. I think that whatever you take away from the performance, if it’s art that touched you, that made you feel something… that’s good that’s all you can hope for. But if you want like a revolution, if you – if you want change – you’re probably going to have to go outside and get some or make some.

Black history, women’s history, civil rights broadly for all Americans - Kendrick & Josh Johnson reminding us, TV off. We need to make new history to preserve the history that came before us. It’s that dire now in America.

On Meta's content moderation changes

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 14:51:00 -0500

Meta announced a significant change to their content moderation practices yesterday. If you haven’t read it, it boils down to this (from Zuckerberg on Threads):

Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US.

Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.

Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.

Bring back civic content. We’re getting feedback that people want to see this content again, so we’ll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.

Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.

Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.

I have a strong perspective on this, but I wanted to highlight some of the best analysis on the issue that I’ve read so far, in particular this passage from Casey Newton from his Platformer newsletter:

Chastened by the criticism, Meta set out to shore up its defenses. It hired 40,000 content moderators around the world, invested heavily in building new technology to analyze content for potential harms and flag it for review, and became the world’s leading funder of third-party fact-checking organizations. It spent $280 million to create an independent Oversight Board to adjudicate the most difficult questions about online speech. It disrupted dozens of networks of state-sponsored trolls who sought to use Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to spread propaganda and attack dissenters.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg had expected that these moves would generate goodwill for the company, particularly among the Democrats who would retake power after Trump lost in 2020. Instead, he found that disdain for the company remained strongly bipartisan. Republicans scorned him for policies that disproportionately punished the right, who post more misinformation and hate speech than the left does. Democrats blamed him for the country’s increasingly polarized politics and decaying democracy. And all sides pilloried him for the harms that his apps cause in children — an issue that 42 state attorneys general are now suing him over.

It stands out to me that the moves this week are consistent with his actions in 2016 and 2020. These moves are externally prompted - reactions to whoever seems to hold power versus some new beliefs or principles held by the company or by Zuckerberg himself.

Whatever else I think about the specific changes they announced, the thing at the top of my mind right now is why Zuckerberg believes things will go any differently for Meta this time? The two most likely answers to that are, first, (as the pieces linked below all mention) this is a uniquely “transactional” administration - a polite way of saying this administration can be bought, explicitly. The second possible answer is that it… just won’t go differently. It’s going to be easy for people to continue to be mad at Meta. Many of the issues people are upset about are, honestly, non-partisan: harm to their kids' mental health, fraud, and hate speech. While some groups may welcome some of that content, especially the hate speech, I still don’t see that as being acceptable to many voters with more loosely held partisanship.

Meta, in a way, epitomizes the product development version of the view from nowhere - the elevation of some noble position without doing the actual work that make that position noble. As it has been for journalists, maybe this is ultimately a no-win battle for Meta anyway, but it’s definitely so when it’s so obvious that there’s no deep principle here on what makes a safe online space or a great social experience. They’re just optimizing different metrics. Trump gives them an easy way to optimize some of the business and regulatory battles ahead.

For a more favorable view of Meta’s changes, I’d recommend Ben Thompson’s piece today, ¹ where he does a great job analyzing this as a potentially rational decision independent of politics and outcomes for users. I want to highlight this portion, which he quotes from an earlier post (summer 2024):

The fundamental issue with blaming misinformation on Facebook for Trump is that it was, to use Zuckerberg’s words, “a pretty crazy idea”. That’s why all of the efforts over the last eight years to contain misinformation have totally failed; worse, they have actually made everyone mad at tech, not just Democrats. In short, you have an industry that has been endlessly vilified in the press, bent over backwards to do what the press demanded, but instead of receiving credit for those efforts, has only seen itself even more isolated and under siege…

What Horowitz says about the pain of switching sides and losing friends is important: I have criticized tech companies for alienating their natural allies in Washington, but what I am driving at in this Update is the extent to which the Democrats generally and the media specifically have made a similar error; by making tech the scapegoat for Trump, “the deal” that united tech and Democrats was broken. The end result is not so much enmity as it is naked self interest. In other words, the surprise isn’t that Musk and Andreessen and Horowitz are supporting the politician that is better for their business ventures, but that Democrats gave up the enviable position of being the default choice for people who didn’t want to think about politics at all.

I don’t agree with some of Ben Thompson’s political views, insofar as I understand them through his writing, but I respect his views immensely. For me, it’s hard to argue against two basic observations: no one is happy with content moderation in Meta’s products, and Democrats haven’t done much to govern in ways that encouraged tech companies to support them. His full argument is worth reading in its entirety. The net effect: for tech companies, Trump is much easier to read and manage - pay him, and he can be placated. It’s horrifying to write that about an American president, but… here we are.

Final thought - these changes will be massive for how we measure, understand, and combat misinformation on the internet. I just listened to a wonderful interview with Renee DiResta. Worth listening to if you want more details on how misinformation was researched before and how things might change from someone that was at the forefront of this work.

Actually, one more thing - my own personal take on this is maybe more nuanced than you’d expect: I am very concerned about this, not for electoral interference reasons, but because of potential harm to communities I care about, along with minorities of all stripes. As Casey Newton pointed out in the piece above, we’ve seen the worst that can happen with light moderation in Myanmar - that ended in genocide. The US is in a bad place right now with public discourse and rising political violence. Maybe we’re all a lot savvier about social media now, and this change will have little effect. That is the free speech argument - that more speech is the only way to combat “bad” speech. I’ll be honest - even though I generally agree, I am not confident our systems can survive that approach given asymmetrical passion and asymmetrical amplification by the platforms.

As a final example, it’s worth pointing out that a major presidential campaign was willing to lie about immigrants eating pets. They didn’t back down when numerous people pointed out that this was a lie. The only thing that stopped it from being a major factor in the election was, IMHO, the obvious ridiculousness of the lie. A bigger lie, but made in a more plausible way - e.g. the way trans athletes were disproportionately vilified during the election - will easily get amplified by social media. I don’t know how to combat that, and I worry these changes undo the best effort any platform has made yet to combat this sort of evil nonsense.

I hope Meta approaches this problem as a core product experience - how to really get community notes at scale on posts that may not be fully public, in a way that elevates the correction as much as the original bad take. That would be wonderful. I worry they will do what Meta does - optimize the easily quantifiable metrics at the expense of a truly meaningful free speech platform.

Because of this, I’m going to actively prioritize my networks on Bluesky - please follow me there if you haven’t already.

UPDATE: I swear I checked, but I really wanted to include a take by Mike Masnick, who writes a lot about content moderation and free speech issues with tech. Well, he posted literally as I was posting this. Worth reading in its entirety. He covers a lot of ground, including some of the positive in Meta’s announced changes - it’s a really good piece. He does go into the politics, unlike Ben Thompson - to me they’re indisputably tied to this change, and he seems to agree:

The timing of all of this is obviously political. It is very clearly Zuckerberg caving to more threats from Republicans, something he’s been doing a lot of in the last few months, while insisting he was done caving to political pressure.

I mean, even Donald Trump is saying that Zuckerberg is doing this because of the threats that Trump and friends have leveled in his direction: [embedded tweet removed]

I raise this mainly to point out the ongoing hypocrisy of all of this. For years we’ve been told that the Biden campaign (pre-inauguration in 2020 and 2021) engaged in unconstitutional coercion to force social media platforms to remove content. And here we have the exact same thing, except that it’s much more egregious and Trump is even taking credit for it… and you won’t hear a damn peep from anyone who has spent the last four years screaming about the “censorship industrial complex” pushing social media to make changes to moderation practices in their favor.

Go read it!

UPDATE 2: Just read John Gruber’s take at Daring Fireball. Some echoes of my point above:

What the whole thing primarily highlights is that Zuckerberg has no guiding principles — zero, zilch, nada — behind any of Meta’s platforms other than “success” in and of itself. Is it about you and your closest friends and family? Or about following celebrity influencers? Politics yes, or politics no? The answers were all different a few years ago, and they’re likely to be different again a few years from now.

Does anyone believe Meta is going to really, thoughtfully try for a solution here?

UPDATE 3: Masnick wrote a post looking deeper at the specific changes announced by Meta, specifically around language dealing with LGBT+ topics:

Indeed, the most incredible thing in all of this is that these changes show how successful the “working the refs” aspect of the MAGA movement has been over the last few years. It was always designed to get social media companies to create special rules for their own hot button topics, and now they’ve got them. They’re literally getting special treatment by having Meta write rules that say “your bigotry, and just your bigotry, is favored here” while at the very same time suppressing speech around LGBTQ or other progressive issues.

It’s not “freedom of speech” that Zuck is bringing here. It’s “we’re taking one side in the culture war.”

It really is incredible.

Ben Thompson’s posts are behind a paywall. It’s not a cheap sub, but it’s 100% worth it if you want to understand the business of technology. If you can’t or don’t want to get a sub, ping me and I will share a copy. ↩︎

Uncertainty is going to be the one certainty for 2025

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 14:05:07 -0500

If you remember the first Trump presidency, it seemed like some major news broke every month, either creating outrage or introducing a new avenue for corruption. Things were unpredictable and some level of volatility ruled the day.

My sense is that while things will be more stable - wealthy Americans and corporations seem prepared and willing to pay (or bribe) to enjoy some stability - there’s still a lot of risk. Additionally, that risk itself is unpredictable. A stupid example: I accelerated the purchase of gear just in case tariffs to really kick in. Now it looks like Trump may be willing to excuse companies for various reasons.

I just don’t know how much the rest of the country will be willing to accept the direction the wealthiest want to go, even amongst the Trump voters. There’s at least one common thread between January 6th and the public discourse around Luigi Mangione’s assassination of a healthcare executive: people are angry. That anger is getting redirected toward violence. The question is whether there’s a trend line here and where it’s going. For better or worse, this sort of violence isn’t necessarily new for America, but it feels different to me.

I keep thinking about the line from “The Big Short” where the Brownfield guys explain their investment thesis:

People hate to think about bad things happening so they always underestimate their likelihood.

I’ve definitely been avoiding thinking about the worst that’s possible in the next 4 years…

Everything my doctor told me was basically right (or lessons from using Stelo for 3 months)

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 00:09:16 -0500

Let’s start this post by sharing an embarrassing fact: between leaving Disney in early 2022 and leaving Ohai in late 2024, I have gained about 28lbs (about 12kg). This wasn’t a new trajectory - going back to the beginning of 2021, I’ve put on 40ish pounds. By January 2024, I was a very unhealthy weight and just plain unfit.

My checkup with my doctor at the beginning of the year raised some alarms. I was at risk of being diagnosed as pre-diabetic. My blood pressure was starting to wobble higher from its normally consistent healthy level. I wanted none of this future and began making changes. My weight leveled off, but I was unable to really get it moving downward consistently, or improve my energy levels. Eventually, I started feeling crummy & unhappy¹ which led me to execute the reset I should’ve done back in 2022.

As part of the reset, I’ve incorporated using a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to help track my blood sugar. CGMs are most often associated with diabetics who want to avoid the annoyance of finger pricks to monitor their blood sugar. These days, though, CGMs are also being used by athletes to optimize training and performance. These little coin-sized sensors provide insights more difficult to capture from other biosensors. There are also a few startups built around these non-diabetes uses, for example Levels.

I’m not a high performance athlete, but I still wanted a CGM. My initial goal was really simple: I was determined to lower my average glucose level and knock down my A1C before my follow-up exam this month (December 2024). I was also curious if it would help me gain insights into some occasional bouts of fatigue that didn’t seem tied directly to sleep quality.

Over the summer, a new CGM hit the market that didn’t require a prescription: Stelo. Stelo is made by Dexcom, makers of a popular CGM for diabetics, so they know how to build these sensors. The device costs between $84-$99/month, depending on the length of your subscription. They offer a single purchase (w/o subscription) and 1- and 3-month subscriptions. They can be expensed to your FSA/HSA if you want.

I started using Stelo in September. Attaching the sensor is painless. The “needle” part of the sensor is super thin. I’ve never felt it go in in the 6 times I’ve replaced the sensor. It’s more painful removing the sensor - the adhesive is basically like pulling a bandage off. The sensor uses bluetooth to share data to my phone, which then records it in the background, (optionally) sharing it with the Apple Health app. ² The sensor takes about 30 minutes to warm up/calibrate, and then you get readings every minute that get pushed to your phone periodically - usually within 5 minutes, but sometimes a bit longer. Each sensor will last 2 weeks, and the app will notify you when it’s time to replace it. It also manages a grace period so you have time to replace it when convenient.

The app has some rough edges and bugs, but works well enough. The app will trigger a notification when it detects a blood sugar spike (i.e. a significant change in levels, which can be the normal result of eating or a heavy workout). Tapping on the notification will offer you the option to log anything that happened around the spike - meals, exercise, a stressful event, or other notes. There are weekly insights, tips for managing blood sugar, and a few other things in the app, but I basically live on its home screen, which shows the most recent readings and a graph of the last 3, 6, 12, or 24 hours.

In the three months I’ve had it, I’ve basically learned that everything my doctor has been gently encouraging me to do really has measurable, direct effects on my blood sugar and, more importantly, how I feel.

I know what you’re thinking: I’m an idiot for not realizing this (or listening to my doctor). I’ll concede you have a point, but in my defense the sensor described the magnitude of the changes I needed to make, and the consistency with which I needed to implement them. Before, I fell into the trap of sort of making changes without doing anywhere near enough. The little real-time reminders, tied to real data about my specific body and choices I made that day - not just a timer that says “drink more water!” or whatever - created a perspective shift for me that registered deeper than anything else I had heard or tried to that point.

So, what have I learned since starting with the sensor?

First, the difference between sedentary and even a small amount of daily movement is significant. Even a short walk after a meal can curb a glucose spike that might trigger fatigue for me. A more intense workout, e.g. a 30-minute Peloton ride or strength workout, will lower my average blood glucose for the rest of the day. A consistent schedule of daily movement, even if it’s just leisurely walking, was the key to a sustained reduction in my average blood glucose.

None of this should be a surprise - it’s why Oura and Apple both have step counts or activity goals in their basic feature set. The nice thing is that I could see when my body needed the workout, which made it easier to stay motivated and make adjustments if my meeting schedule or family schedule prevented a workout or a healthy meal.

I was also able to see a correlation between food and the afternoon waves of fatigue that would hit on some days. There’s more I need to track there before I can share more conclusions, but there’s a pattern there that I’m now mapping to tracked macros for each meal. I’m removing carb-heavy quick options (e.g. grabbing a bagel) for busy days and incorporating more of the protein-rich salads I used to eat daily at ESPN’s cafeteria pre-pandemic. Those are just two examples of several significant tweaks I’ve basically measured my way into. These changes are more recent (in the last month), but they’ve been working out really well so far.

I’ve got a long road ahead of me, especially as I ramp back up into full-time hours over the coming weeks. I lost a ton of weight back in 2009-2010 - nearly 80lbs (36kg) over 18 months or so. I’ve done this before, and know it can be done without all of this technology attached. That weight loss journey was before kids and before I was a senior executive with a large team, though. ³ The demands on my time are greater and more varied these days. The tech helps me follow a plan I can sustain and adapt going forward, no matter where my career or family life goes.

In that way, the data has been a major catalyst for my health. The cumulative effect of the perspective shift, along with the smaller, weekly tweaks to sleep and diet, has been fairly dramatic: more consistent energy levels, better workouts, and my weight is finally dropping now. Oh, and my blood sugar labs and blood pressure were much better this most recent checkup, a big victory. It’s been worth it for me so far.

I may stop using the Stelo in the spring unless I get back into longer-distance cycling or running again, where the data could help shape the rides/runs. I do want to get back into both by next summer, if my body is up for it. If all goes to plan, I should be facing that decision in the spring. Wish me luck!

Tips & Tricks for Stelo

Here are some notes for things I’ve learned over the last few months. I’ll keep this updated as I learn more.

Shave your arm where you want to attach the sensor, especially if you have hairy arms. My first sensor was fine, but with my second one, the adhesive overpatch didn’t last the full two weeks. Since shaving my upper arm, I’ve had no issues. Few people will see that part of your arm, in case you’re worried about aesthetics.
I found using something like the Nood Eraser easier than a razor on that part of my arm.
Some folks also suggest prepping the area with SkinTac to help adhesion, but I haven’t needed it after shaving.
I do use the opposite product, TacAway to clean up the adhesive residue left behind by the sensor when I swap it out. Just wait for it to evaporate before inserting the new sensor.
Buy a pack of overpatches in case you do have one come off for some reason - an intense workout, tight clothes that peel up the edges, or whatever. Best to have them on hand for an emergency. You can find them at Amazon, of course, but your local pharmacy probably has them. When my second sensor’s overpatch came off, I was able to pick up compatible patches at my local CVS.
The nutritionist/lifestyle coach I’m working with warned me that CGMs can be somewhat inconsistent from one two week period to the next. They’re useful as directional guidance vs getting too worked about the specific level, at least between two different sensor periods. I have seen this in practice. If you need to be sure, you can pick up a blood prick sensor and see what the variation is. Those tend to be much more accurate, even amongst different manufacturers. I haven’t gone that far - for me the goal is the notification from Apple Health letting me know there’s a new baseline for my average blood glucose levels.

Note: The links to Amazon above are affiliate links, which may result in me getting some money if you click on them and buy.

Imagine being tired all the time, with too much to do at work (startup life!), and feeling like everyone had demands of your time. In hindsight, I was on a trajectory to burn out by the end of the year. I’m glad the team I worked with helped us make adjustments to help and then eventually worked with me to plan an exit so I could execute a reset. ↩︎
If you’re working with nutritionists or doctors who have EMR systems connected to Apple Health, that can give them near real-time access to readings. It’s pretty handy. ↩︎
The words of The Making of a Corporate Athlete ring so true. Sheila, our CEO at Ohai, shared that article with all of us early in the Ohai/Proof of Learn days, to her credit (we really did have a good culture from that standpoint, a lesson I will carry forward). It is a personal regret that I didn’t take even stronger steps to put a rigorous fitness plan in place before the most intense months of the Ohai work. I was still running a bit and eating somewhat well, but not enough to counter the effects of a MUCH more sedentary lifestyle working from home combined with getting older. ↩︎

Link: Jeff Bezos’ view from nowhere

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 23:18:53 -0500

It’s appropriate that I should revive this site for the first time in years to post about politics, I guess. We are entering dangerous waters as a nation. That’s why Bezos’s decision and editorial this past week was one more disappointment on top of so many others. I was sketching out an articulation of why the piece bothered me even more than the LA Times situation. Luckily for you you don’t need to read my writing. Casey Newton wrote a wonderful piece on the issue, which you should go read. It’s spot on - Jeff Bezos is stuck at Day 2 with the Post:

Yesterday, I explored how billionaires are thinking about their relationships with Donald Trump on the eve of the election. Just before I hit send, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos responded to criticism that he had prevented his editorial board from publishing its endorsement of Kamala Harris. It’s a piece of writing notable for how dated its thinking is for a famously forward-thinking entrepreneur. And to borrow a phrase from Amazon, it’s a recipe for a media industry that remains stuck squarely in Day 2.

Worth reading the whole thing. The “view from nowhere” is poison when more and more audiences are turning to social media, clearly partisan voices, and spaces devoid of any cognitive dissonance. Of course faux neutral is not going to help.

New hosting for Fatmixx

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 12:12:45 -0500

Fatmixx has moved from Pair.com to micro.blog for hosting. This also means we’re no longer using Wordpress and are now hosted on Hugo. Old URLs should redirect to the new ones, images should be working if they worked on the old host. If you see anything weird, let me know.

If you want more technical details on why the change, I wrote more about this on UsefulClever.

BTW - this had nothing to do with the recent Wordpress controversy, I’ve wanted to do this just for efficiency & security & cost for months. The controversy did bring it top of mind though.

Monday links moving to another site

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 13:43:33 -0500

Hi folks - hope you're having a good Friday! I've decided to consolidate the tech things I'm doing onto my other site, UsefulClever, which is where I was putting some of the fun projects I'm working on. There's a little more to this move that I'll share later, but if you're a long time reader of this site, add UsefulClever to your RSS reader or wherever you get the blog. Ping me on Twitter if you have any questions or concerns.

You'll notice that I'll be migrating the existing Monday Links posts to UC over the day.

Time Should Fade (Almost) Everything...

Wed, 01 Aug 2018 21:07:10 -0500

Update: There aren’t APIs for most of the services that I’d want to use here, so I’m putting this project on pause for now. I’ll probably hack something together for my own use, but trying to turn this into a service doesn’t seem possible given API usage guidelines from these services.

I posted the following to Twitter the other day:

So, if all goes according to plan, all of my Twitter history up to yesterday-ish will be deleted, and I will have setup some code (that I control) that will delete everything older than 7 days on an ongoing basis.

I used to believe that everything posted on the Internet should stay, forever. I’m not so sure that is true. Published for public consumption, forever? Beginning to doubt that for most normal humans…

In the near future (weeks hopefully), I’m going to start automatically hiding old photos, blog posts, everything except those that seem really worthwhile to keep up indefinitely. I’m working on the rules still, curious what people think are good rules.

I’m almost certain that corporate social media policies, especially for public facing employees, should strongly recommend services that do the same - either delete or tighten up permissions after a window of time on public posts (And anything on FB)…

So, in short - you’re only going to see ~7 days of old tweets on my Twitter account. This post is about how I’m setting that up.

The short term hack

Twitter makes this hard (though I think this is unintentional). Specifically, they make it hard to access anything more than the last 3200 tweets in your account via the API. So, getting your account down to just the last 7 days ends up requiring two bits of software:

Find a way to delete tweets older than my most recent 3200.
Setup a process that watches my twitter feed regularly and deletes tweets older than 7 (or whatever) days.

Deleting all of my tweets

I decided I would delete all of my tweets to begin with. If twitter offered a native “archive” or unpublish option, a la Instagram, I may not have deleted everything. But they don’t, so this was my only option to start with a clean slate. ¹

I found a small script someone wrote on Github, forked it, and then modified it quite significantly. The script and instructions are on my Github account. You’ll need to be comfortable at the command line if you want to use it. It’s rough, and I offer no guarantees that it will run smoothly for you. Also, keep in mind - it will delete all of your tweets, and there is no undo. Keep your backup archive safe, and make sure this is what you want: delete everything.

To get around the 3200 tweet API issue mentioned above, the script uses the tweets.js file that comes in the data backup from Twitter, so the good thing is that you’re basically forced to download the backup to use the utility. That file contains the IDs for all of your tweets (among other things), which is all we need to issue the delete command for that tweet.

The ongoing culling of my older tweets

Again, I started with someone else’s code. I found a nice little project written in Go that leveraged AWS Lambda to run the little bot. I used this project as a chance to brush up on my Cloud Formation skills, as well. My fork, with CloudFormation templates, is on my Github account as well. There’s even a handy “Launch Stack” button if you want to set it up on your own AWS account.

The bot runs every few hours, looks for tweets in my account older than the interval I’ve configured, currently set at 7 days, and deletes them if it finds anything. It’s all pretty simple.

Making this a thing

As I started working through this, I starting thinking about enabling this for the other social media services I use. I don’t know why everything, from Flickr to Pinboard don’t offer ephemerality as a feature. If the feature is offered, it should be the default. As I mentioned at the start, I don’t believe we, as people, are prepared for a world with total recall of our every utterance. My thoughts on this are complicated,² but suffice to say, I am going to build tools that allow me to manage my social media presence following these guidelines.

I mentioned this to a few folks, and got a few enthusiastic “I want that for my account!” comments. So, I’m going to spin this up as a side project and see what I can cobble together. If you take a look at the code I linked to above, it’s very simplistic - fine for a single account, but not the best for a real service.

The other aspect of this I’m working on is governance. I don’t want to do this as a business - that’s not a goal. What I do want is a service that has a strong privacy stance, that offers high trust to folks that use it. One of the reasons I didn’t use the public services that are out there is that their business model is unclear. ³

I am hoping to use this as an experiment in a cooperative form of governance for an online service, one where any charges are transparently used to maintain the service, where the source code is available for people to review, and where users can have some sort of assurance that the code that is released is the code that the hosted service is actually running. These seem like interesting problems regardless of the service being offered.

Because naming things is easily the most important and most fun part of any project (seriously, I have so many domain names!), I’ve decided to call this the Time Fades Project. A placeholder page is all that’s over there, but stay tuned for more.

If you have any interest in this sort of governance topic, or in contributing to the service, or in what a good set of default rules are for these sorts of ephemeral behaviors (I expect this will need to be different for different social networks), please get in touch.

I didn’t feel too bad about this, because I had an out. As part of this process, I had to download my official twitter data archive, which has everything. On top of that, I use a bookmarking service called Pinboard that has a feature that copies all my tweets and makes them searchable, privately, just for me. (It does require the paid archive feature in order to get the full text of the tweet. Otherwise it only stores a truncated version of the text.) ↩︎
For example, I’m not in favor of the right-to-be-forgotten laws even as I want services to offer that capability on the individual service level… ↩︎
I do think the popular ones, like TweetDelete, seem like fine options. That one, for example, is owned by a hosting company that doesn’t seem to need the revenue from a tweet deletion service. ↩︎

I Deactivated My Facebook Profile

Sun, 25 Mar 2018 22:15:48 -0500

Just as a public service announcement: I deactivated my Facebook account to see what it’s like to not have a Facebook account. I suspect I’m going to run into places where it’s impossible not to have one, but let’s see what it’s like.

Over the past year, especially since the 2016 election, I find Facebook… exhausting. Mentally, it’s draining. Lots of debate, lots of echoes, and mental noise in my life that I don’t really need. In January, I deleted the app from my phone to see what that was like.

While it wasn’t a major factor, after the Cambridge Analytica stuff and yet another “Facebook abused it’s access to your phone” tidbit coming out, I’m also just kinda done trusting their engineers.

If you want to keep up with the kids, friend me on Flickr or Instagram¹. If you want to keep up with my news posts, follow me on Twitter. If you want to just ignore me, I’m cool with that, too. :)

I’m contemplating starting a project with a friend or two to replace the most valuable (to me) function of FB - as a clearinghouse for keeping up with your friends & family. More on that once work quiets down a little. Lots of ideas on how to structure that as a side project…

Yes, I know it’s owned by Facebook… ↩︎

E Pluribus Unum

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 11:51:00 -0500

The motto of the United States is not, in fact, “Fuck you, I got mine.” It was, and should have remained, “E Pluribus Unum” — out of many, one. We’re all Americans. We all deserve the blessings this country can provide. This one is willing to pay his taxes for the benefit of the many.

Source: John Scalzi (read the whole thing)

We hold these truths to be self-evident...

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 01:30:39 -0500

Like many of you who vehemently opposed a Trump presidency, I've been walking around in a bit of a stunned stupor these last few days. I'm gathering my thoughts on what I want to do next, and how I can do the most I can to help bring about a more respectful world. There has to be a better way for us to talk to each other, and a better way to be humans to each other.

Until then, I've been reflecting on what I know:

I know I can't comprehend running away, even though given my current work experience, I could probably easily find a job overseas. I also can't see disengaging, Garrison Keillor, "Let them deal with it" style. I love my country too much, and I know evil flourishes only when good people do nothing.
I know most Trump voters aren't KKK style racists. Thus, I don't blame Trump voters en masse for the racism and bigotry that's emerging (and sure to get worse) or think they're all racists.
I know that many of non-racist, non-sexist Trump voters seem blind to the limitations of their own experiences and the biases that creates. I hope that the these voters recognize the real fear that many minorities are feeling after the election. It is real. There are real fears here informed by real violence happening right now, real fears caused by un-American behavior.
I know that we, as a society, seem to be lacking in basic empathy these days. We are too willing to believe people we disagree with are stupid or blind or ignorant. Please try to approach your fellow Americans with an open mind and an willingness to understand their perspective. You don't need to agree - but it's better than assuming they're idiots or stupid for being scared. I try to assume people are acting in good faith until they prove they aren't.
I know that Facebook and Twitter have fed a lot of the divisiveness this election cycle, no matter what Mark Zuckerberg says, or what picture Jack Dorsey paints about his own beliefs. We don't all need to agree, but we do need to agree on a common set of facts and some shared truths. We can and should interpret those according to our own beliefs and our own perspectives, but we can't disagree on whether gravity works or that 2+2=4. For a lot of reasons, we have receded into echo chambers, and we need to do something about it (or it will get a lot worse).
I know the Democratic party as it stands doesn't work the way I want it to anymore. We need to help the party evolve, possibly by working outside the party. Tea Partiers organized. Folks that have an alternative need to do the same.
I know I need to engage more. More at the local level. More at the state level. And then maybe at the federal level. The question in front of me is, "How?"

That's the question that will preoccupy me until we move back home. I'll probably not write anything else until then. I won't be able to help but retweet the odd Trump item on Twitter, but I'm going to dial back on social media, read and follow what he does, and talk offline to friends and family. It's time to get to work.

Barack Obama And Doris Kearns Goodwin: The Ultimate Exit Interview

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 23:19:31 -0500

But I tell you what, though. [Long pause.] I’m named Barack Hussein Obama. I’m African-American. And I’ve been elected twice to this office with the majorities of the American people. So something is working.

Vanity Fair

Wonderful interview with President Obama. Such a decent man with a deep appreciation for America and its history. We're going to miss him, even the folks that hate him right now.

Rethinking the Work-Life Equation

Sun, 28 Feb 2016 01:48:45 -0500

Workers in the experimental group were told they could work wherever, and whenever, they chose so long as projects were completed on time and goals were met; the new emphasis would be on results rather than on the number of hours spent in the office.

NY Times

From Humble Beginnings: the NFL vs. eSports

Thu, 25 Feb 2016 03:05:01 -0500

By most accounts, American Football¹ started out with humble beginnings: a college sport that branched off association football (rugby) that spawned a bunch of disorganized professional organizations that eventually coalesced into the NFL and the college football behemoths we know about today.

The game started in the mid 1800s. The first professional game was in the 1890s, with the first player getting a secret single game contract that paid him $500 (a staggering $13,000 in 2016 dollars). By 1920, what would be the NFL was born. Players were averaging a few thousand dollars a year ($27K in 2016 dollars) by the 30s and often took second jobs to make ends meet. By the 70s, the modern game and the college game began to take the form we see today. The rest you know: Billions of dollars and a billion fans watching for it’s marquee event.

Parallels

In the late 90s, a new genre of competition now called MOBAs (multiplayer online battle arena) came to be. Derived from a popular real time strategy game, Starcraft, it has since spawned a growing industry of games in that genre. A few games, League of Legends (LoL) and Dota 2, have tournaments with million dollar prizes. They have college clubs around the world, including at a few you may have heard of. They even have their own doping problems.

Discovery

ESPN streamed a Dota 2 tournament in 2015 and even broadcast a MOBA on ESPN2 last year. Hard core sports fans were less than impressed.

I admit, I also was a little confused why a game I personally had never heard of, let alone played, was worth broadcasting on TV. Being me, that meant I started doing my research: learned about big prizes and huge audiences, read about the massive popularity of eSports in Korea, and looked at the games themselves.

That these games are the popular tournament ones makes sense to me. I used to love RTS games back in the day². These RTS games are the predecessor to LoL, Dota 2, and Vainglory. MOBAs still share a lot in common with their ancestors. These games are a mix of:

pure reflex and physical skill
complex strategy carried out on a deceptively simple field
clear, easy to understand objectives

Actually, kind of like the NFL.

In other words, if you don’t play, you can still tell what’s going on at a basic level (kill the other team, take an objective). But if you play… wow, there are layers to unfold and strategies to debate and technique to admire.

I don’t play Dota or LoL, which is why a single Dota 2 broadcast couldn’t keep my attention for the whole event. I thought it was cool, recognized the RTS heritage, and basically went back to watching sports.

Revelation

One day, I picked up Vainglory. It’s a free MOBA for iOS which was featured during an Apple event. I dove in and immediately was hooked. I wrote about Vainglory (indirectly) last year. At that time, I had been playing the game frequently for months, so now (except for a couple month hiatus around the birth of my daughter) I’ve been playing this game for over a year. I literally play a round most nights before I head to bed.

I’m naturally competitive, and so naturally I want to be good at this game… Which is when the whole thing finally clicked.

In the Twitch post, I likened watching Twitch to the Golf Network. Boring if you’re not a golfer, but a great source of tips and help if you are. This is true of the entire community around video gaming now. For example, I’ve been watching videos on YouTube like BenTimm1’s videos to learn strategy and tactics. Tournaments are often streamed on Twitch.tv, so that’s another good resource.

Vainglory also has televised tournaments in Korea. The Vainglory IPL is broadcast on OGN, “a South Korean cable television channel that specializes in broadcasting video game-related content and eSports matches.” Here’s one of their broadcasts of a Vainglory IPL final:

Those are pretty good production values, which isn’t very surprising given the popularity of eSports in Korea. You can see a huge improvement, though, as each subsequent tournament is streamed. There’s a big improvement in the commentary, for example, even from the Vainglory World Invitational final, which took place right before the IPL tournament embedded above.

It’s important to note that this is for Vainglory, a relative newcomer to the MOBA and eSports world. Take everything I’ve said above and amplify it for LoL or Dota 2. This is a shot from Wikipedia of the Dota 2 finals crowd in Seattle:

[caption id=“attachment_24736” align=“aligncenter” width=“720”][ By User:DarthBotto, CC BY-SA 3.0, [commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.p…](https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33874814[/caption])

Legitimacy

While the Great Depression hurt the growth of the NFL, it did provide one benefit: it convinced otherwise respectable men to turn to football as a primary source of income. These were college educated men, disproportionately from white collar families who probably would’ve pursued other opportunities. This raised the talent level, making the league stronger and likely creating a feedback loop³.

Vainglory, my favorite, is still small, paying out 10s of thousands for their grand prizes. Dota 2 has much higher payouts and an enormous prize pool. LoL is further along in their growth, and their tournaments provide a sense of where things are going. Riot Games, makers of League of Legends, provides salaries for their tournament players along with travel stipends. Make the choice to leap into professional eSports easier and the talent should follow.

All of that combined makes being a professional “League of Legends” player a viable career opportunity. This helps the game reach its full potential, because we want to avoid our pro players coming under financial stress and having to hold down part-time jobs. We want to make it so being a pro player is a completely viable career opportunity. Riot Games' CEO, Brandon Beck

It’s still not huge money. With sponsors involved, some of these players are making a decent living, even if they need to also have a side job. Kind of like the early NFL.

Prediction

The big MOBAs are growing the infrastructure around eSports in a way that points to a sustainable future. There are campus organizations forming along with amateur associations. There’s also more mainstream acceptance of gaming thanks to smartphones, and thus a bigger potential audience. The choice to play competitively is getting easier to make for players. Those trends just need to continue in the same direction, and eSports could be a huge thing. Maybe… kind of like the NFL.

… hey, I’m overseas now, have to distinguish! :) ↩︎
I was a decent Starcraft player in my youth, and related titles like Warcraft III and Command and Conquer are still some of my favorite games. And wow, I didn’t realize C&C was still being released… ↩︎
I didn’t find too many sources aside from that one book (which I only have the Google excerpts for - it’s out of print, it seems). The draft came to be toward the end of the Depression and pre-WWII, which could correlate. It’s unclear (to me, right now) if the draft initially was because of an abundance of potential players or a way to entice players in. Worth doing more reading around this. ↩︎

Master & Dynamic MW60 Headphones - Bluetooth headphones that live up to the hype

Sun, 07 Feb 2016 09:37:34 -0500

So, I may have a headphone problem the way some people have shoe problems.[footnote]though my wife swears I have a shoe problem, too…[/footnote] It's not quite as bad as what I see with hard core audiophiles, but still, it's bad.

Headphone addiction is kind of like they way people get hooked on adrenaline sports. You just need to get a taste, that first moment when a pair of headphones make you sit up and go, "whoa!"

For me, it first started with the first pair of headphones that really drove consistent bass (remember Sony's Mega Bass? I totally got sucked into that hype). Eventually I grew up, realized that there was a lot more going on aside from the bass, even for EDM or whatever. The real a-ha moment came with a pair of Etymotic ER-4Ps that I still own to this day. They are my reference for great mid & treble response. Their only drawback is their bass response. It's good, but not great, especially for tracks that really need solid bass response.

Still, I have so many "whoa" moments with these headphones. I'll be listening to music I've listened to a hundred times with other headphones and I'll just hear some detail that will pull me out of whatever I'm doing. "Whoa, what was that?" I'll just stop & listen. It might just be the brush of fingers on a guitar, the bite of a bow on strings, or individual instruments that seem to merge together on other headphones.

The problem with the Etys is that they are IEMs - in ear monitors, or what everyone else calls earbuds. They go into the ear canal, creating a seal. The quality of the seal affects bass response. That adds a variable on top of the 4Ps flat response. So, while they feel exceptionally clear, sometimes I want to feel the sub-bass thump of an EDM track or the bass line of a hip hop track. They just showed me what was possible, but I knew there had to be better. Beyond that, IEMs aren't as comfortable for long sessions, and they're not interruption friendly (can't just drop them to my neck). Plus, no mic or playback controls on these, either.

So when I returned to ESPN, knowing I'd be working in an office again [footnote]I really miss working at home sometimes… being able to crank a pair of desktop speakers is pretty nice.[/footnote], I started looking for over ear, closed headphones. I've used a pair of Sennheiser HD-280s (which I also love) at work since I moved to CT, through 4 different companies, but they are finally falling apart. Besides, they aren't very portable nor do they have controls for play/pause/skip or a mic for calls. So, I began searching for a good desktop pair that also had phone controls and great, "whoa!" inducing sound.

One caveat - I'm not an audiophile, I don't have golden ears, so while I aspire to own something truly crazy like the HiFiMan HE6's[footnote]… which require a higher end amp to drive them, probably another $500-1000 on top of the price of the headphones…[/footnote], I've generally stayed around the $300 mark (or less). For me, headphones are less about an ideal sound and more about clarity. I want them to show me something new about my music while staying very close to what the artist heard in the studio.

I've gone through my share of headphones. I tried the Sennheiser Momentums, knowing I like Sennheiser's sound, but returned them due to fit issues (ear cups were too small for me). I bought a pair of PSB-M4U1s based on reviews at Marco Arment's site and The Wirecutter. Those were the pair I was using daily until recently.

Though the reviews were great, for my taste I found the PSB's a tiny bit bass heavy and a little muddy in the mids and muted in the treble. Good all around sound, I like them, but I had very few "whoa!" moments. Maybe even zero… I can't remember any right now. They're also huge, at the outside edge of portable.

So I've been keeping an eye out for a new pair. This winter, I decided to get myself a gift, the Master & Dynamic MW60 Wireless headphones.

I found out about them from a bunch of press reviews around the launch, all of which were uniformly positive: The Next Web, Wired, Engadget, the Verge. Basically, a great sounding Bluetooth headphone with a unique design and a listening profile that matches my tastes.

The main criticism is their cost. These are expensive, luxury headphones but they live up to the luxury end of the deal. The materials are amazing. The construction is solid. The earcups are so soft and just plain pleasant to wear that I'm happy to wear them for long stretches.

They're also Bluetooth headphones, with the tradeoffs that implies: requires charging, can have interference, and requires codec support on your playback device.

I'm not concerned about charging. The MW60 have a built-in Li-Ion battery, and charge using a micro-USB cable. I have yet to run down the battery, and I've gone a few days without charging at times. They claim 16 hours of use between charges. They can also fall back to corded use.

On the interference front, I've had nearly zero issues. The MW60s have much better range and reception than most Bluetooth headphones owing to their iPhone 4-like external antenna design. Like the iPhone 4, though, you can touch the antenna or brush it accidentally and cause the signal to drop out. I've had a few blips now and then, but not enough to get me to switch to corded use (a cord is included, can be used instead of BT). It is awesome, however, to not have to deal with the cord anymore and to still have really good sound.

To maintain sound quality over Bluetooth, the MW60s support aptX, so you have that available if your phone or other playback device supports it. iPhones do not support aptX, but not to fret. Apple chooses to send AAC audio over Bluetooth, which the MW60 supports (I confirmed w/ Master & Dynamic before ordering). Depending on who you ask, the quality is comparable to aptX.

As I mentioned, my sound preferences tend toward the more balanced side of things. The MW60 delivers on that, with a slightly bumped bass response. That's pretty much perfect for me.

There are a few things I would improve. The button controls for play/skip/previous could use a rethink. The buttons have several functions overloaded in unique (to me) ways. The headphones have 3 buttons, but they don't map to the typical 3 button remotes on other headphones. The Apple earbuds, Bose QC-25's and my PSBs all use the main play/pause button as a skip/previous button: single tap play/pause, double tap skip, triple tap previous. The MW60 uses long presses on the volume buttons as skip/previous buttons. It introduces a delay in the skip process - basically, I want to go to the next track, but I have to wait. I also can't skip quickly because each skip is a press, wait, press, wait, etc...

One other smaller gripe: I wish the included cord was a mic + remote cord. It's nice to have the ability to go corded for long calls, especially in the car, and to know that I can move the mic closer if it's particularly noisy.

These are all ultimately small issues. My only real regret is not getting the brown leather version. I ordered the black pair, as all my other headphones are black, but almost immediately regretted it, too late to change the order, though. I'll live though. They're still amazing to look at. Just not as striking as the brown leather.

I haven't yet mentioned the price, but they're expensive (MSRP is $549). There is a lot of competition in this price range. Other reviews have suggested the Bang & Olufsen BeoPlay H7, the B&W P5s, or the Sennheiser Momentum 2.0 as alternatives. Those are cheaper and many have a noise-canceling option at a similar price point. I haven't tried any of those, to be honest. I'll admit that this purchase was at least 50% driven by the design of the headphones[footnote]Though, I did research Master & Dynamic's previous releases to make sure I would like the sound and they lived up to the reviews. The MW60 are based on the wired MH40, which have a longer review history. For example, check out Head-Fi's reviews of them.[/footnote] I'm glad I took a chance on this.

Overall, I would recommend these if you like the look of the headphones, are OK with the tradeoffs around Bluetooth (which, IMHO are minimal with this or any high-end modern set), and are looking for a luxury item. There are better value picks out there, but this pair is gorgeous.

One year later with the Twelve South SurfacePad

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 10:34:46 -0500

A year ago, I wrote that the Twelve South SurfacePad was my favorite iPhone case. After a year, I'm still very happy I bought the case. I love knowing that I can leave the house with just my phone knowing I have the two most important cards with it.[footnote]Interestingly, in the US, that's my driver's license and main credit card. In India, I just carry two credit cards since I don't have a valid driver's license.[/footnote] I thought it would be worth following up on two aspects a year into using this case based on the most common questions I saw in reviews while buying the case.

The biggest question was around one of the marquee features: can it be moved/removed without residue and while still remaining effective?

For me, I ran into a snag, but was able to get it off and onto a new iPhone successfully. The snag has to do with how the adhesive is made. It's basically attached as a sheet to the insider of the leather. As I started pulling the case off the phone, the adhesive sheet started separating from the case and sticking to the phone. I just stopped when I noticed that, made sure I got the adhesive off, and then made sure to peel by pulling the adhesive & leather. The adhesive stayed intact as a sheet, still attached to the case, once I got the first edge pulled off. I had no problem after that. No residue on the old phone, too.

I then reattached it to the new phone. So far, it feels snug, I can dangle the phone by the case and the adhesive doesn't seem to budge at all. I'm pretty happy.

The second question was around how the leather would age. Leather darkens and can stiffen as it ages, especially something like a phone case that's always in my hand or in a pocket.

It has definitely darkened, and I'm debating whether to get a new case for this reason. I do like the darker red, but I'm going to get some leather cleaner and see if I can brighten it up.

The slots that hold the cards still hold the cards well, but they do slide around a tiny bit. I have one card that's heavier, made of a faux metal material, that does want to slide out if I shake the case. That may seem contrived, but I do jog with the phone in my hand, which does worry me a little (I check to make sure the phone is right side up as I begin.

I've included a photo below that shows the case back when I bought it, the case now, and the back of the old phone. The phone photo was taken without any cleaning or other work - just the case removed. Click on it for a larger view.

Even with the wear, I'm really happy with the case.

Saying goodbye to Google Analytics, Hello Piwik

Sun, 02 Aug 2015 12:08:39 -0500

In my previous post, I mentioned that I was looking at reducing my dependence on free services as an experiment to see if I can improve my privacy.

That post was about changing my behavior as a consumer. This time, I’m looking at the services I use in my personal development work, especially those services that feed ad networks. In the case of my personal sites, this means Google Analytics (GA).

I did some looking around, and decided I want to be close to the same functionality as GA. It’s not a fair comparison if I don’t have the same features, so that criteria limited my choices.

After some poking around, I settled on running Piwik. It’s open source, free, and can be self-hosted on hardware I control. It seems extraordinarily customizable, though I haven’t done much here.

There are other choices like Mint or Woopra or Snowplow. There are actually more commercial options than I realized, in addition to the giants like Adobe’s Marketing Cloud (aka Omniture).

Ultimately, I chose Piwik because of it’s simplicity, it’s feature set, and it’s flexibility. I wanted to own the data[footnote]I’m surprised more companies don’t setup their own analytics, at least in addition to their primary service. A lot of interesting things can be done with the raw data.[/footnote] and I also wanted the ability to keep up with a massive site if necessary.

So far, so good.

My Piwik Setup

I setup a cheap VPS somewhere, created a domain to host the server, and then ran Piwik on that single box. It looks like the service could have been installed on my simple web hosting account at Pair Networks[footnote]Which I recommend: use this referral link to give me credit.[/footnote] with room to grow, but I wanted to work through the server setup for a refresher on setting up a VPS from scratch.

I then followed the Getting Started guide. That’s pretty much it.

Setup was also not as smooth as hoped. The configuration wizard has a bug, for example, that wouldn’t let it complete (I fixed it locally because I could - yay open source). It’s also non-trivial setting up an Apache server with SSL enabled when you haven’t done it in a while.

Cost

Piwik has a hosted option where I still own the data, but it’s not cheap (Piwik Cloud is minimally $29/month). Not the best option for me.

The good thing is that the software itself is free. Of course, nothing is exactly free. Here are some of the costs I ran into:

hosting for my own Piwik instance
SSL certificates to enable HTTPS
GeoIP database for accurate IP to location lookups (I ended up sticking with their free option)

This list doesn’t include my time getting all of this running, plus the time required each year to make sure the servers are secured, running the latest security patches/upgrades, and are monitored.

Looking back on it, Piwik Cloud might have been worth it when you consider the time & money spent.

Bye Google Analytics

I’ve removed Google Analytics from my main personal web projects, and replaced it with the Piwik tracking call. Since my server is the only thing that sees this data, hopefully people are more willing to whitelist the tracking domain in their ad blocker.

Goodbye Google Apps (GMail), Hello Fastmail (and MailRoute)

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 13:46:51 -0500

I recently moved nearly all of my email off of Google’s services over to Fastmail, with MailRoute in front of it to block spam. [footnote]My @gmail.com address can’t be moved, and I’m keeping it. While I'm shifting most of that email to my main address, I'll still use it for some things.[/footnote]

So far, I’m really happy. The services are relatively inexpensive, and the features compare well with Google, both in terms of space as well as functionality that I used. The best thing is that Fastmail offers a real, simple, plain vanilla IMAP implementation, which means it works a lot better with my iPhone and OS X’s Mail.app without weird label/folder/all mail strangeness.

MailRoute’s best feature is the quarantine summary email. Basically, each morning (or any interval you define), MailRoute sends an email listing mail it blocked that might be legit. Each email listed has a link to recover the mail and/or whitelist the sender. So, from there, I can quickly recover false positives without logging in and trolling through dozens of obvious spam emails.

I’m really happy with the setup, and with a lot of the surrounding email cleanup this prompted - I consolidated a few addresses and unsubscribed from a lot of newsletters/marketing crap I wasn’t reading anyway.

On the spam front, it’s just a tiny, tiny bit worse than what I had with Google. There are fewer false positives (legit email that ends up in the spam folder) and once in a while, a spam message makes it into the inbox. There are knobs and controls to twiddle with if that bothered me, but so far I’m not motivated to fix it - it’s just not enough of an inconvenience that it bothers me.

Whys and Wherefores

Both Fastmail & MailRoute are paid services, while my use of Google Apps for Domains/Business/Work/whatever-its-called-today was free. So, why did I do this?

I had a long, rambling explanation written talking about tracking and the ad market and evercookies and super cookies and why this bothered me, but I’ll summarize all of this with a few images. These are all the third party elements loaded when you visit a major online site like people.com:

Step down to a smaller publication that has to be more creative about ad networks or revenue, like, say the Norwich Bulletin:

Tell me the business models and privacy policies of all of those third party sites. I’m in the industry and even I don’t recognize them all.

While most of the top 10-20 online sites are pretty good about restricting the partners they work with, ad retargeting and related ad models are getting more popular, all of which require tracking you as you wander around the web.

I just want to browse the Internet without a simple Google search or visit to an Amazon product page, for example, following me around the Internet for the next few days. So, that means not relying on services that need that data unless I have no choice. [footnote]I still can’t justify/rationalize quitting Facebook or Twitter. Moving email providers was easy. Yay, standards![/footnote]

Email is only one of the things I’m looking at removing. I’m testing out DuckDuckGo instead of Google Search.[footnote]so far, Google just seems better, especially for technical/programming searches. I haven’t switched over to DDG yet.[/footnote] I’m also contemplating writing/installing/tweaking a web analytics package to get rid of Google Analytics. That’s a bigger time commitment, though, so I may just need to find one with a better privacy stance.

Why Fastmail and MailRoute?

There are a lot of services out there and, if I’m being honest, I didn’t do a ton of research on this one. Just too busy these days. I heard about both of these services over the last few months from the Accidental Tech Podcast (MailRoute sponsored them a few times, I think), and co-host Marco Arment has blogged about them a few times.[footnote]That post, by the way, expresses a lot of what I like about this setup[/footnote]

So, I basically just ran with that recommendation after pricing it out and deciding that the $5-6/month was worth it. A little more privacy (plus the better/different features) for a little bit of money seems like a fair tradeoff.

Like I said, it’s been about a month and I’m very happy so far.