Ringing the bird
I was on an early morning walk and came across a guy staring at the telephone wires. As I approached, I caught the distinct aroma of marijuana. I turned to see what he might be looking at, and he held a finger to his lips to quiet me. He whispered, “there’s a mockingbird up there. If you listen, he’ll ring like a bell.” Sure, buddy.
So we stood there in silence, and then the little bird opened his mouth and sang chimes to us. He rang like a bell.
The stranger and I looked at each other, then smiled and laughed as we went our separate ways. That was a nice way to start a day.
Heavy traffic is not a DDoS
Ajit Pai claimed that when the FCC asked citizens to comment on Net Neutrality, their website was attacked with a distributed denial of service, or DDoS. I’ve heard many of his defenders claim that an overwhelming number of people trying to use the website to comment was in fact a DDoS. This is a lie.
It was not a kind of DDoS. Words mean things, and “DDoS” specifically means a coordinated attack. What the FCC experienced is what we call “heavy traffic”. A car analogy:
- “Heavy traffic” is rush hour on the freeway.
- “DDoS” is a mass protest with people physically blocking lanes on the road.
Even though the end result might be everything moving slower than desired, if you’re stuck in traffic but you tell your boss that you’re late to work because a protest blocked the street, you’re exactly as much a liar as Ajit Pai was when he perjured himself to Congress.
"At a Crucial Juncture, Trump's Legal Defense Is Largely a One-Man Operation"
At a Crucial Juncture, Trump’s Legal Defense Is Largely a One-Man Operation — The New York Times
Highlights:
Joseph diGenova, a longtime Washington lawyer who has pushed theories on Fox News that the F.B.I. made up evidence against Mr. Trump, left the team on Sunday. He had been hired last Monday, three days before the head of the president’s personal legal team, John Dowd, quit after determining that the president was not listening to his advice.”
Also:
“Mr. Dowd had concluded that there was no upside and that the president, who often does not tell the truth, could increase his legal exposure if his answers were not accurate.”
Jokes about “the best people” aside, it sounds like genuinely competent people want nothing to do with the fiasco in DC.
How many minutes of Internet are you paying for each month?
If you pay for a 100Mbps cable connection to the Internet and your plan sets a 300GB data cap, you can use your connection at full speed for 8.3 hours per month before hitting overuse charges.
If your cell phone plan supports 50Mbps LTE speeds and has a 10GB data cap, you’re only allowed to use it at full speed for 33 minutes per month.
I think it’s deceptive for an ISP to advertise an Internet connection’s speeds without disclosing how much you can actually use it without being disconnected or racking up extra fees. I’ve written to my senators asking them to introduce legislation to protect customers from this misleading and predatory practice:
I believe that all Internet service providers should be required to disclose, as part of their advertising, how many minutes you may use their service at full speed without hitting data caps.
For instance, a cable company advertising “100 megabits!” but imposing a 300GB data cap only allows their users to download information for about 8 hours per month. A cell phone company that advertises fast 50 megabit LTE speed but has a 10GB data limit only gives their customers about 33 minutes per month of full speed usage.
I believe that simultaneously advertising fast Internet connections while only allowing customers to use it for a short amount of time each month is highly deceptive and should be illegal. Please introduce truth in advertising legislation requiring ISPs to disclose what portion of time customers on a typical plan would be allowed to use an Internet service being advertised.
I don’t reasonably expect anything to come of this, but I’m going to try anyway.
Airlines Restrict 'Smart Luggage' Over Fire Hazards Posed By Batteries
Airlines Restrict ‘Smart Luggage’ Over Fire Hazards Posed By Batteries : The Two-Way : NPR:
“Beginning Jan. 15, customers who travel with a smart bag must be able to remove the battery in case the bag has to be checked at any point in the customer’s journey. If the battery cannot be removed, the bag will not be allowed,” American said in a statement on Friday. The same day, Delta and Alaska announced similar policies on their flights.
American’s policy dictates that if the bag is carry-on size, passengers can take the luggage onboard, so long as the battery can be removed if needed. If passengers need to check the bag, the battery must be removed and carried onboard. But if the bag has a nonremovable battery, it can’t be checked or carried on.
An FAA spokesman told The Washington Post that the airlines’ policies are “consistent with our guidance that lithium-ion batteries should not be carried in the cargo hold.”
Last month I wrote: “Listening to an ad for luggage with a built in USB charger, which may be the worst idea ever. Now your suitcase can grow obsolete. What if it breaks? Or a bigger battery comes along? And you always have the weight penalty even when you don’t need it.” I think we can all agree now that this is a terrible idea for many reasons.
App subscriptions must offer value
Software authors are increasingly switching to subscription models to make their work “sustainable”. Too often they’re forgetting to make a value proposition that helps their customers. Here’s a hint: if you have to write a Medium post explaining why I should support your new business model, you’re doing it wrong.
I understand why authors can’t afford to write an app and then offer free upgrades for the following decade. That’s a great way to cut off the income supply that keeps new development happening. Neither authors nor their customers want that! Creators want to be compensated for their time and users want up-to-date software with competitive features. Buying an application one time shouldn’t come with the expectation that I should get all the newest work for free, forever.
The alternative is not that purchasers are an endless font of cash and goodwill, though. A recent trend is for annual app subscriptions to cost roughly the same as buying a copy of the app each year. In the real world, no one does this and it’s not sustainable. If you want to move to a subscription model, your price has to make sense as a value proposition by itself. Customers don’t care about pretty words and guilt trips in long blog posts. They want a good deal from their own perspective.
From a customer’s point of view, the math is simple: your target annual fee is the previous price divided by the number of years I would have expected to keep a paid copy before upgrading. For instance, if your upgrades used to cost $40, and you released new paid major versions every two years, I can be convinced to subscribe at a rate of $20 per year. Anything beyond that is a price increase, and that increase must be justified exactly as if you were selling me a new copy instead of a monthly rental. That is, you can’t tack on “…and now with cloud sync!”, or “…for teams!”, or pack it with other features I won’t care about and expect that I’ll happily pay twice the old price.
1Password did this right: although their new “1Password Families” service costs more than their old software licenses, it offers lots of features that genuinely make it more useful. Smile Software did this wrong: their new annual TextExpander subscription service costs about the same as their previous one-time software licenses, but all of the new features were geared to a workflow that could not have been less attractive to me if they’d tried. They were asking me to pay a lot more and get nothing of value to me in return.
In summary, you want to make money. I want you to run a profitable business so that you’ll continue to make the software I enjoy. But you have to remember that while your app is your labor of love, for me it’s just a tool I use for work or play and it’s not my life’s ambition. It’s the one among several competitors that had the best value proposition. If that ever changes, I’ll re-evaluate and move on to one of the others. I’m frustrated that this is 101-level business class stuff, and we shouldn’t need to keep learning this lesson anew.
Introducing metric quantity units for computing
In computing, metric-sounding prefixes almost universally refer to sizes expressed as powers of two:
- kilo = 2^10 = 1024
- mega = 2^20 = 1,048,576
- giga = 2^30 = 1,073,741,824
- …and so on.
In 1998, the IEC incorrectly voted to change that, and it’s time to fix this mistake.
Using “k” to mean 2^10 dates back to at least 1959, with Gordon Bell of IBM ("Architecture of the IBM System/360"), Gene Amdahl of DEC ("Instrumentation Techniques in Nuclear Pulse Analysis"), and others standardizing them as units in 1964. Since that time, binary units have been used pervasively to describe quantities. Well, almost. Hard drive manufacturers started using the smaller, metric homonyms to describe their products with larger numbers than their competitors. That is, a company could market their 50MB hard drive as 52 (metric) MB so that it sounded larger than anyone else’s 50MB drive. This caught on like wildfire because marketing loved it, even though binary sizes were correctly used for everything else.
The International Electrotechnical Commission decided to weigh in, and in 1998 (the same year that gave us SOAP) decided that the electronics industry should change their standard units to use a new system. Henceforth metric-sounding prefixes would start referring to decimal sizes, like:
- kilo = 10^3 = 1,000
- mega = 10^6 = 1,000,000
- giga = 10^9 = 1,000,000
- etc.
This was bad enough, because those numbers don’t naturally correspond to anything computer-related except hard drive sizes. For instance, the IEC would have us incorrectly believe that a 32-bit address could refer to 4.29GB of RAM. No. Worse, though, were the fictional binary units they invented to replace the actual industry standard. From then on, we were to say that:
- 1,024 bytes = 1 KiB = 1 kibibyte
- 1,048,576 bytes = 1 MiB = 1 mebibyte
- 1,073,741,824 = 1 GiB = 1 gibibyte
- and I lack the stomach to continue.
Donald Knuth said:
The members of those committees deserve credit for raising an important issue, but when I heard their proposal it seemed dead on arrival — who would voluntarily want to use MiB for a maybe-byte?! […] I am extremely reluctant to adopt such funny-sounding terms; Jeffrey Harrow says “we’re going to have to learn to love (and pronounce)” the new coinages, but he seems to assume that standards are automatically adopted just because they are there.
Knuth, as always, was right. The awful-sounding standard was appropriately mocked and ignored. Western Digital settled a lawsuit in 2006 for marketing an 80 billion byte hard drive as 80 gigabytes, with the plaintiff citing the fact that even then — 8 years after the “standard” was passed — essentially no one used metric sizes to refer to quantities.
A few well-meaning but misled companies have started using the metric units. For instance, Apple’s macOS describes hard drive sizes in metric units (but inconsistently lists RAM quantities in correct binary sizes such as 16GB). Before this snowballs out of control, we need to reach a real industry-wide standard that engineers will actually use. I assert that:
- Computing, as do all other industries, has its own jargon. Our mouse is not a mammal, and our prefixes don’t need to mirror the metric system.
- The current IEC standard looks terrible, sounds terrible, and is nearly universally avoided.
- The great thing about standards is that we can make our own and start using it.
The binary kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabyte are our heritage and our vocabulary. In the realm of computing, we own those terms. Therefore, I propose a new standard for describing storage quantities in computing. Effective immediately, metric-sounding prefixes in computing officially refer to their binary sizes as they have since IBM and DEC claimed them in the 1960s. Furthermore, metric sizes will use the new “tri” infix notation — abbreviated “t” — like so:
- 1,000 bytes = 1 KtB = 1 kitribyte
- 1,000,000 bytes = 1MtB = 1 metribyte
- 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1GtB = 1 gitribyte
- and so on for tetribyte, petribyte, extribyte, and so on.
Let people who want to use different units be the ones to adopt them. And frankly, “metribyte” sounds a lot better than “mebibyte” ever will.
Traveling with OmniFocus and OmniOutliner
I don’t travel a lot, so when I do I invariably find that I’ve forgotten something important (9 PM the night before: “say, dear, where are we boarding the dogs?” “I thought you were doing that!”). I wrote an AppleScript to copy items from an OmniOutliner document to an OmniFocus project so that I never have to forget again.
I love OmniFocus. It runs my life. But it lacks any kind of a template systems to let you quickly churn out copies of a project. That’s exactly what I needed here, though. Fortunately OmniOutliner fills that gap and gives me a nice way to describe that project. Here’s how mine starts:
When I run the AppleScript and say “I want to travel on June 24”, it creates actions like “Call the vet to make pet boarding arrangements, with the Phone context, due on June 3 at 5PM”. I add everything to this list:
- USB gadgets to charge
- Toiletries to pack
- Things to remove from my messenger bag (so I don’t find myself in line at security and realize I’ve still got my pocket knife)
- People to notify, such as telling my credit union that I’ll be using my debit card in some exotic place like Topeka and please not to block it as fraud
A magic moment for me was hearing Merlin Mann’s suggestion to add an “update this list” action:
A couple of days into my trip, I get a reminder to add anything new I’d forgotten or wish I’d done differently. This turns my template into a living document of exactly my own personalized requirements.
Provider
The shield was half-heartedly poking at her keyboard when the car started to move. Oh. “I guess I’m rolling. Coverage is sketch here so I might cut out.”
“Oh my God. You’re still shielding her? I thought we paid you better than that.” His voice lifted when he disapproved. She rolled her eyes. “Her husband gives me a hundred bucks plus six a mile. She probably just wants ice cream or fries or something.”
She didn’t mention the time when it wasn’t just ice cream or fries, but shopping down in the Long Beach Autonomous Zone. That trip had covered her rent for two months. She didn’t know how to get any good drugs in Little Utah, though, and she had been bored out of her mind, barely leaving the car. He was still pissy that she’d left without telling him first. She didn’t care. They chose her more often because she was willing to roll on a moment’s notice.
“I worry, you know.” His tone softened. He probably did worry. “I know. You shouldn’t. Nothing ever happens. As long as a rock doesn’t fall on the highway or something, it’s free money.” If it did, well, that would be different. As negotiated and coordinated with the AIs steering the cars around them, her own little car would race to wedge its way between the road hazard and the cargo she was protecting, absorbing the damage so that her employer’s car didn’t have to. Lots of shields walked away from events. Sometimes they didn’t. For six bucks a mile, she was ready to take that chance. US West law didn’t allow unoccupied vehicles on the road, so she hung out and napped her way through riding shotgun.
“Look, I’ve gotta go. I need more insulin and they pay up hourly. I wanna top off my playlist while I still have data. I’ll hit you up when I get back.”
“If. If you get back.”
“When,” her voice shaking. She didn’t have time for this.
America's military versus the world
I am pro-military. I think having a strong military means we’re unlikely to have to use it to protect ourselves. But how strong does it actually need to be?
For the sake of argument, I’ll assume that spending corresponds to strength. That is, America spending $1 million gives us roughly as much military power as China or Russia spending $1 million. If this is not true, then we’re spending money poorly and should re-evaluate our budget before increasing it. But that whole line of argument frankly disrespects our world’s finest soldiers and sailors, so let’s agree to set that aside for now.
According to SIPRI, these are the budgets of the world’s biggest militaries in 2015, in billions of dollars:
World Military Spending, 2015
| # | Country | Spending ($B) | Cumulative ($B) | Ally |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | United States | 596.0 | ||
| 2 | China | 215.0 | 215.0 | |
| 3 | Saudi Arabia | 87.2 | 302.2 | |
| 4 | Russia | 66.4 | 368.6 | |
| 5 | United Kingdom | 55.5 | 424.1 | ✔️ |
| 6 | India | 51.3 | 475.4 | ✔️ |
| 7 | France | 50.9 | 526.3 | ✔️ |
| 8 | Japan | 40.9 | 567.2 | ✔️ |
| 9 | Germany | 39.4 | 606.6 | ✔️ |
| 10 | South Korea | 36.4 | 643.0 | ✔️ |
The extra column, “Cumulative”, is a running total of the budgets of countries other than the United States. Look at Germany, #9 on the list: that’s where the rest of the world added together is finally bigger than America. We literally spend more than the next 8 countries after us. Of those, UK, India, France, Japan, and Germany are staunch US allies. Removing those, we outspend the remaining top three countries by 60%. Even in an outlandishly unrealistic scenario where we’d be fighting all three of them simultaneously1, with no help at all from our allies, we’d probably still win by a wide margin.
If something like that happened, we would get help from our allies on this list, whose militaries add up to $274.4B, or just $94.4B shy of those top three “unfriendly” countries (and $59.4B greater than China alone). In a likely situation where the rest of the world shows up, our combined allied strength is vastly stronger than any potential enemies.
We’re currently hearing lots of propaganda about our pathetic, run-down little military. Those are unpatriotic lies. We already have the world’s largest military and it’s nearly three times stronger than runner up China. We could probably be making wiser decisions about how we’re spending our money, but if anyone tells you we should be spending more, make sure their hands aren’t reaching for your wallet.
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China and Russia aren’t strongly allied with each other; they’re not going to double-team us. We are China’s biggest trading partner and they don’t want to cripple their economy by destroying that relationship. We have our disagreements with Saudi Arabia, but not so many that they’re going to throw away decades of friendship and attack us. That we’d have to fight all three at once is ridiculous, but I’m using that as an absurd worst-case scenario. ↩︎
Search-proof your devices when traveling
Over-eager airport security has recently taken to making travelers unlock their phones and tablets for examination. This is both unforgivably invasive and trivially easy to defeat. Here’s how to protect your data1 on your iPhone or iPad2 when traveling.
Simplest: disable Touch ID
- Enable a six-digit passcode on your device.
- Set your device to erase itself after 10 failed passcode attempts. You should do these two steps anyway!
- Before you get to airport security, turn your device off. iOS devices require a passcode to unlock themselves the first time after they’re turned on. For dumb legal reasons, passcodes are generally thought to be protected by the 5th amendment, but fingerprints are not.
Now you have at least the physical ability to refuse to unlock your device. Be prepared for mental or legal pressure to supply your password, though. File this under “better than nothing”.
If you want to keep your current device
- Turn on iCloud backup.
- When it’s finished backing up, reset your device to its factory settings.
- When you get where you’re going, restore your device from backup.
You’re traveling with a device, but one as bare as the day you originally bought it. Be prepared to explain why you’re carrying an empty device.
Keep your device, but less suspicious
- Turn on iCloud backup.
- When it’s finished backing up, reset your device.
- Start using it. Add a few contacts. Set up a (disposable) email account. Add some songs.
Now you have a plausibly used device. When you get to your destination, reset your device again. Restore it from backup. This is more work than the previous instructions, but also less suspicious.
If you’d rather travel bare-handed
- Turn on iCloud backup. Let it finish.
- Leave this device at home.
- When you get where you’re going, buy a replacement device. Restore it from the backup you made earlier. Now you have an exact clone of the original.
This is the most expensive option, but you can’t unlock what you don’t have.
Conclusion
Searching travelers’ devices at airports is security theater. It’s a massive and inconvenient violation of privacy, and only the world’s least prepared criminals would ever get caught this way. I guarantee I’m not the first person to think of backing up a phone and restoring it at my destination. Since it’s ineffective and almost certainly unconstitutional, cooler heads would recommend ending these pointless searches. Don’t wait for that to happen. Protect your data.
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This isn’t meant as advice for criminals. Lots of people travel with information they’re legally obligated to safeguard, like company plans, legal documents, and other confidential information. ↩︎
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Similar ideas apply for Android and other devices, but I don’t have one of those to experiment with. ↩︎
Purge your Yahoo account (but don't delete it!)
There are about 1.5 billion reasons to want to cancel your Yahoo account. Don’t do that!
According to Yahoo’s account deletion page, they “may allow other users to sign up for and use your current Yahoo! ID and profile names after your account has been deleted”:
This is a terrible policy not shared by other service providers, and there are many scenarios where it’s a huge security problem for Yahoo’s users. For example:
- You register for Facebook with your me@yahoo.com email address.
- You forget about that, read about the newest Yahoo user database hack, and delete your Yahoo account.
- A month later, someone else signs up to get your me@yahoo.com email address. They use Facebook’s password reset mechanism to take control of your account, download your private photos, and say nasty things to your friends.
- Oh, and anyone you forgot to share your new address with is still sending personal communications to your old Yahoo address, and its new owner is reading them.
Here’s what you should do instead:
Purge your Yahoo account
It’s time to move on. Yahoo has a terrible security track record and shows no signs of improving.
First, understand what you’ll be doing here. You’ll be removing everything from your Yahoo account: your email, contacts, events, and so on. Permanently. There’s no changing your mind. It’s extreme, sure, but until you do it’s likely that hackers can:
- Read messages from your spouse or partner.
- See your calendar events to know when you’ll be away from the house.
- Take over your account and start resetting every password associated with it, like Facebook, Amazon, and your bank.
Don’t delete your account. Clean it out!
Secure it
Before doing anything else, change your Yahoo password! Hackers probably have your current one. I’m not exaggerating.
Once that’s done, turn on two-factor authentication (2FA). This can prevent hackers from accessing your account even if they get your password.
Once that’s done, make a note to yourself to turn on 2FA for every other account you have that supports it.
Make your new home
Before you start, you’ll want to create an email account with a new provider. Lots of people like Gmail but pick one that looks good to you. This will be your new home account on the Internet: the email address that you give out to friends and coworkers and that you use to log into websites.
Clear your email
- Log into your Yahoo mail.
- Click the little checkbox above your emails to select all of them.
- Click the Delete button to delete all email on that page. If you have lots of messages, you may have to repeat this several times.
- Hover over the Trash mailbox to make the trashcan icon appear. Click the trashcan.
- Confirm that you want to empty your trash.
Clear everything else
If you’re like most people, that’s probably 99% of your Yahoo data. You’re not quite done yet, though! Now click through each of the services in the little icons in the top left corner:
They all may have more information stored in them. Each works a little differently but you should be able to figure out how to clean out each one.
Set a vacation reminder
Other email providers make it easy to forward all of your incoming mail to a new account. Yahoo removed that feature recently so you can’t use that convenient approach. Instead, you’ll make a Vacation Response to tell people about your new address.
- Click the settings gear in the top right corner.
- Choose Settings, then Vacation Response.
- Check the box to “Enable automatic response”, and set the Until: year to as far in the future as it will let you.
- Enter a message like:
I may now be reached at me@example.com. Please update your address book. Thanks!
- Click Save.
Now anyone writing to you will get a message with your new address, but their email will still land in your Yahoo inbox.
Change your logins
Now go through your web accounts and change all of them where you log in with me@yahoo.com to use your new email address instead. If you use a password manager to keep track of your accounts, this will be easy. Time consuming — thanks, Yahoo! — but easy.
Check back
You’re going to miss a few accounts, and some friends or family will stubbornly insist on sending email to your old address. Set a reminder or mark your calendar to check your Yahoo mail a month from now to see who’s written to you. Update each of those people or accounts, then delete all of your new messages. Check again in another month and then another after that. Eventually this will slow to a trickle and you can forget about your old Yahoo account for many months at a time (or until the next news article about a giant Yahoo hack comes along, and then you can smile to yourself because it doesn’t affect you anymore).
Conclusion
Migrating off Yahoo is a pain in the neck. Google, in contrast, makes it easy to extract all your information and then securely close your account. Yahoo does not. It won’t be quick or painless, but I recommend that you start now.
Migrating off Evernote
In late 2016, Evernote updated their privacy policy to explicitly grant their employees the right to view your personal information. In their own words:
And please note that you cannot opt out of employees looking at your content for other reasons stated in our Privacy Policy (under the section, “Does Evernote Share My Personal Information or Content?”).
This is unacceptable for most of the things you’d want to use a note taking application for, and I believe that makes it wholly unfit for any kind of business or private use. The good news is that there are viable alternatives now. These are the options I particularly like:
Synology Note Station
If you have a Synology NAS, you can install Note Station which is basically Evernote but hosted on your own server. It has nice (and free) iOS apps, and an Android app that I haven’t used. There’s no desktop app yet but it does have a nice web interface. This is probably the easiest drop-in replacement for Evernote — if you have a Synology.
Note Station and its mobile apps are free but might not (yet) be quite as polished as you’re used to.
DEVONthink
If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, I highly recommend DEVONthink Pro Office (DTPO). It’s not so much a note app as a personal knowledge repository. My home ScanSnap scanner deposits docs directly into my DTPO inbox and OCRs them so they’re fulltext searchable. It also has a nice UI for creating your own notes, spreadsheets, etc. directly in the app, and great system integrations to make it easy to save data from almost any app into it. It has an amazing AI classification engine, so it can perform actions like automatically filing documents that look like invoices into my “Invoices” folder.
DTPO also has a new iOS app1 that syncs to it via options such as:
- Local Wi-Fi peer-to-peer connections so that your data’s never stored on any server,
- Dropbox, which is handy if you already use it, or
- Your own WebDAV server, with end-to-end encryption so you don’t have to trust your storage provider. I use my Synology NAS for this method.
Finally, DTPO has a web interface so that you can browse your document databases from another system which doesn’t (or can’t) have DEVONthink installed on it.
DTPO isn’t cheap, but I think it’s absolutely worth the cost.
Recommendation
Of these, I prefer DEVONthink Pro Office as it’s more mature and already has almost every feature imaginable. Note Station is pretty good today, too, and has a lot of promise. Either one will move your data to being completely under your own control and I like that a lot.
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DEVONthink To Go was completely rewritten and released in the summer of 2016. The old version was not well regarded. The new version is amazing and updated frequently. If you had stayed away from it based on reputation, give it another look. ↩︎
Technology IS Politics
It’s not possible for technologists to avoid politics because technology is politics:
- You’re writing an instant messaging app that can more easily share information with law enforcement agencies, or one designed to make that impossible. Either of those alter how governments interacts with their citizens.
- You made a ride-sharing app. It’s now easy for drivers to sign up and start making money, at the expense of existing taxi drivers. Your app alters the workforce.
- Your website does a better job of calculating its users’ income taxes and giving them bigger refunds. It shifts the flow of money through the economy.
None of those are inherently bad, but they do cause changes in the lives and finances of their users. After all, if they didn’t affect people we wouldn’t be doing them.
Technology is politics. It’s logically inconsistent and meaningless to tell an engineer that they’re “too political” or that they should “stick to tech”.
Electronics Kit for my Kids
Cory Doctorow mentioned that Elenco makes a perfect copy of the Radio Shack 200-in-One electronics kit. I hadn’t read to the end of his article before I’d placed an order.
It’s not an exaggeration to say this kit pushed me into my career. I got the original Radio Shack version for Christmas one year when I was a kid, and on rainy days I’d work my way through the book of kid-friendly projects. Even though I usually didn’t understand how they worked, I got brave enough to test ideas like “I wonder if I could wire a light bulb into this section and have it still work?” and “what happens if I replace this with a smaller resistor?” I didn’t know what ohms or farads were, but got an intuitive feel for which parts did what. I lost any fear of experimenting and that willingness to try new things has served me well.
I don’t know if my kids will love this little kit as much as I did. I’m not going to push it — that’s for them to decide. However, a part of me hopes they have even half the fun I got from it.
We had a scary basement
When I was a kid, my parents had a horror movie basement. It was unfinished, poorly lit, and apparently designed to terrorize kids. It was divided into three approximately equally sized rooms:
The wooden, backless staircase from upstairs dropped you into the first. It was mostly OK, but the only light switch was on the far wall away from the base of the stairs, so you had to feel around in the dark to turn on the lights. This is where my parents put the piano I had to practice every day.
The second was separated from the first by a long wall with two large cutout “doors”. One of the doors let into a storage room where we kept canned foods, the furnace, and an opening toward the third portion of the basement. The second was mostly storage. For reasons never told to me, this door was covered with a blue velvet curtain you had to push through, and once inside you had to feel around in the dark for the pull string bulb. The far side of it also opened into the farthest section.
The back part was somehow the least creepy, even though it’s where we stored antiques and my dad’s wood shop. It still had those stupid pullstring lights, though, until you got to the far-far wall where there were switches for the fluorescents over the table saw and lathe.
Digression: my dad’s favorite game was “let the kids watch scary movies, then send them to the basement on errands”. It played out like this: little Kirk is watching The Shining on TV. It’s over and his dad says, “hey, I need to fix this remote. Go get my screwdriver, would you?” He gulps and goes down the basement stairs — the ones without backs so a bathtub woman could reach through them and pull him down to hell. He leaves the pool of light at the bottom, walks across the concrete, and gropes in panic for the switch. He finds it, then pushes through the velvet curtain which immediately falls shut behind him and leaves him in pitch black. Heart racing, he finds the pullstring. Light. He sort of sees the next pullstring farther back, so he sprints to it and yanks it. He yanks too hard and it fails to light, bouncing back upward and landing on top of a chest of drawers. He jumps until he can pull the string back down and yank it again. The light comes on and the demons withdraw back to the shadows. He more cautiously slinks over to the back wall, turns on the overheads, finds the screwdriver, and rests in relative safety for a few breaths. OK, time to retreat. He sets himself in a sprinter’s pose, reaches back to hit the switches, and darts back to the drawstring. Makes it. Does the same setup-switch-sprint combo to make it to the next pullstring safely. Tugs it and darts through the velvety cloak into light again. Pants. Goes to the wall switch, steels himself, and flicks it off. Leaps toward the stairs to hear his laughing dad turn off the light at the top and close the basement door. Climbs a flight in approximately .2 seconds, opening the door and bounding through it in one practiced motion. Sees Dad who examines the screwdriver carefully:
“I needed a Phillips. Go get it.”
My dad was really a great guy, but he’d been through a war and ended up as a mortician. His good intentions were that his kids would get desensitized to their own internal fears and live as carefree adults, free of the dumb little phobias that nag us all. Did it work? You bet it didn’t! But he tried.
Anyway.
So the basement was a horror story set, and yet it’s the one we had so we went with it. During daylight, you could start at the stairs, rollerskate past the furnace into Dad’s shop, loop back around and shoot through the velvet curtain, and go again for another lap around. That was pretty cool.
One un-daylit evening I was downstairs practicing the piano with my little dog sleeping on the rug next to me. I was plinking away until she stood up and stared into the black maw of the furnace room, hackles raising. I stopped. She didn’t. She crept an inch forward, then another, growling, then exploded into barking fury and raced into the back.
I sat on the bench, petrified.
Still barking furiously, she followed my skating path, dashed back into the room with me, rounded the corner, and tore back off into the back.
My breath and heart had stopped. I was frozen in space and time.
My protective pup ran two more laps and raced one last time into the back.
And then “it” growled, low, guttural, and loud. She screamed in pain, reversed course to shoot past me, and flew up the stairs to safety.
I sat there, in the same dark basement with the thing that drove my dog into a frenzy before hurting her into abandoning me. My heart beat once, then twice. I erupted into a panicked explosion of terrified kid and somehow made it upstairs and locked the door in a single motion. I found my little dog, two long clawmarks across her face.
My parents came home and I told my dad what happened. He was afraid an animal had gotten in, but we went around with a flashlight and a shotgun. All of the windows were locked shut as usual, and there were no signs that anything could have gnawed through the concrete walls. Something hurt my doggy, though, and I didn’t have to practice piano after sunset for a while after that until Dad forgot the whole thing and we fell back into the old routines.
You think your basement was creepy? You don’t know what that word means. I have stories.