If you’re a vim user like I am and you run crontab -e and get dropped into nano, you’re likely to make the same face as a baby eating a lemon. Not fun, but there’s a fix. Update your shell configuration file (.bashrc, .zshrc, .profile, whatever), to include the following: alias crontab=”export VISUAL=vim; crontab” Then you can simply…

There are many reasons why you might want to know what technologies a site is running. You might like how the site looks or functions, and want to copy it. Or you might be a security tester looking for vulnerabilities. For a long time, BuiltWith was pretty much the only option out there, but it’s a paid offering…

I’m an Apple Watch user who loves table tennis, and merging these two is not super intuitive. When you first start the Workout app there is no table tennis option available. Here’s how to make the app more table tennis friendly. Start a workout type of “Other”. Play table tennis like normal. When you finish your workout, end…

I really, really tried to keep a case on my iPhone X. Just like the other 9 I’ve tried it with, I lasted 2 days. I just can’t do it. It’s like going to a fine restaurant and putting Vicks under your nose while you eat. What’s the point? Some good things are just fragile, and I’m ok…

I just camped for my 10th iPhone, meaning 10 straight years starting with the original iPhone in 2007. The iPhone X is my favorite device since the original, or perhaps the 5S. It’s hard to compare such things retroactively. Anyway, there are many reviews and write-ups out there, but I wanted to capture a few basic thoughts for…

I’ve been consuming a lot of content about AI lately. I’m reading What to Think About Machines That Think, which is a compilation of tons of expert opinions on the topic, and I’ve also read a few other books and follow the a16z and Waking Up podcast where it’s a frequent topic. These inputs don’t make me an…

One of the most exciting things that the combination of the Internet of Things and AI will bring us is the concept of a life management and visualization system, or a Life Dashboard. Imagine as a head of household being able to define your family’s goals for education, savings, investments, diet, exercise, media consumption, travel and vacations, etc.,…

I’ve thought for a while now that the next big leap in consumer electronics will be personal sensors, meaning—most importantly—video and audio. If people were just recording video and audio while they walked around, that might have some sort of utility, but probably not much. It’d be more effort than it was worth to sift through the content…

A lot of people don’t get the significance of being a product. It doesn’t just mean that you have value, or that you’re important. What it means is that you’re the thing being sold. There’s confusion around this because of ads. Everyone has ads, right? The New York Times has ads, Facebook has ads—whats’s the difference? The difference…

Apple released its iPhone X (ten, not ex) today. I’m a complete Apple acolyte but can’t help but notice that all the main features (edge-to-edge display, wireless charging, and facial authentication) have already been out for months or years from other vendors. I get that most of those vendors do those things poorly, and Apple will finally do…

There’s a lot of talk of voice becoming a major computer interface in the coming years. I agree with this, and I talked about it in my book. But there are some major limitations to voice. It’s audible (that’s the whole point) so it’s not great for use in extremely quiet places like libraries, or extremely loud places…

When Google Reader died I cried a lot. Not sure why you close the best RSS reader in the world but leave Google Wave Talk Hangouts to walk the earth. Anyway. When I was done mourning I started looking for a replacement. None of them were too exciting, but I finally settled on Feedly. I’ve been mostly happy…

I just lowered my Amazon EC2 bill, over 3 years, from $6,120 to $583. Or, put another way, I just saved myself $5,500 dollars. Here’s how it happened. I was in Vegas this week for BlackHat / DEFCON and was hanging with my friend Saša Zdjelar in the hotel and messing with EC2 (as one does in Vegas).…

People are really upset that 1Password appears to be forcing users to store their password data in the cloud. Whenever stories like this come around I get asked what I use for passwords, and since I use lots of different things I simply respond with what I believe to be a truth about tech features. If something is…

I used to be a Gentoo guy. For like 7 years I ran it and it was my world. It was more of a religion than a Linux distro. But perhaps that’s implied. Anyway, I eventually ended up back at Ubuntu. I also used to be a Python guy, but I eventually ended up on Ruby. I feel…

I have an alias I like to use on Ubuntu that goes something like this: alias update=apt update; apt upgrade -y But there’s an improvement that I made recently I’d like to share. First run this to get the tool. apt install debian-goodies Then run this command checkrestart. checkrestart checkrestart checks to see if you currently need to…

[ May 20, 2017 — I have moved from Similar Posts to YARPP because Similar Posts was destroying my box, both from a network requests and CPU standpoint. I’d avoid it if I were you. ] I’ve been hunting for a solid related posts plugin on WordPress for years. My go-to has always been Contextual Related Posts, which…

For example, he says that without Net Neutrality, Comcast can prefer original shows it produces, and slow down competing original shows by Netflix. This is silly: Comcast already does that, even with NetNeutrality rules.Comcast owns NBC, which produces a lot of original shows. During prime time (8pm to 11pm), Comcast delivers those shows at 6-mbps to its customers,…

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I called “Getting Better at Getting Better” in my book. It’s the idea of accelerating machine intelligence, where computers aren’t just getting better at solving problems, but the pace at which they get better increases drastically. I think this comes in two forms: Improved machine learning that improves as we provide…

If you’re over 30 you’re probably a bit averse to using emoji to communicate. You probably think it’s unprofessional, that it’s “not real language”, or that it’s a fad that will go away soon. My opinion is that it’s a permanent part of communication (although it’ll evolve into richer forms), and that if you’re not using it you’re…

If you ever have a web server (or other type of server) running on a remote Linux box, and you want to connect to it using your local system, here’s how you do it. ssh -i ./.ssh/key.pem -N -L 8081:localhost:8000 user@host This reads as: Authenticate using a key. The port you’re listening on on your local system is…

There are credible rumors that Apple is working on AR glasses. Of course that’s not to say that they’ll decide they’re good enough to launch. If and when they do appear, though, I think one of the first attention-grabbing features will be realtime language translation. So, the combination of quality direction microphones, voice recognition, and natural language processing.…

I’ve been quite reluctant to run ads on this website, for a number of reasons. They feel dirty to me, whatever that means. They literally junk up the aesthetics of the site, although the single ad in the sidebar wasn’t bad. I just prefer to be someone who doesn’t participate in the ad modal. For those reasons, I’m…

The final chapters of Homo Deus talks about the concept of Dataism. A cursory glance online doesn’t give too many previous reverences to the term, so I’m not sure if Yuval Noah Harari created the term himself, if he’s giving a different definition for a term already in use, or exactly what that situation is. But let’s use…

Before we can fully transfer and represent human minds into digital form, and thus achieve long-term immortality, we will have many intermediate phases. One such phase will be parsing the artifacts left behind by a living person before they died, and then creating a digital simulation that emulates them as closely as possible. If the simulations are good…

Game Design—defined not just as the visual elements in a game, but the underlying structure, incentives, value systems, and other mechanics—is about to become an extremely important job in our society. In the past the title was associated with the visual aspects of video games, such as the art, the interfaces, etc., and video games have long been…

Benedict Evans wrote a great piece about voice interfaces where he argues his position that voice interface isn’t quite the future of computer interface that we think it is. He mentions a few constraints. Given that you cannot answer any question, there is a second scaling problem – does the user know what they can ask? I suspect…

To a casual observer, it might appear that “voice interfaces” to computers—like Siri or Alexa—are a single technology space. In fact it’s useful to think of them as two problems combined. First, the computer needs to fully understand exactly what you said. That means deciphering mumbling, removing background noise, handling different voices and accents, etc. That’s difficult, but…

I read and think a lot about how humans interact with computers, and what that interaction will look like at various points in the future. I was going to call this a hierarchy of human to computer interfaces, but quickly realized that it’s not a hierarchy at all. To see what I mean, let’s explore them: Input interfaces…

Today, ten years after the iPhone launched, I have some of the same sense of early constraints and assumptions being abandoned and new models emerging. If in 2004 we had ‘Web 2.0’, now there’s a lot of ‘Mobile 2.0’ around. If Web 2.0 said ‘lots of people have broadband and modern browsers now’, Mobile 2.0 says ‘there are…

You might have used Google’s new AMP project without even knowing. It’s a technology that makes mobile page results load very quickly on Google, it displays the content in a more uniform fashion. But there’s a problem. The content loads off of Google’s own server, not from the website itself. Like Medium, where you get all these amazing…

Twitter just sold their developer platform to Google, and it looks like they’re on the way out. I’m concerned about this, and I find it quite strange. Twitter is infrastructure. It’s everywhere. And for that reason it’s super strange to me that it could just go poof. I’m worried about a couple possible outcomes: Nothing happens and it…

Words are 90% dictionary definition. The other 90% of their meaning comes from connotation. I’m not sure what futurist actually means, but I know the negative things I think of when someone uses the term—especially if they apply it to themselves. To me it’s a loud declaration (in the voice of an imbecile) that this person thinks they…

The second reason Medium is preferred is the editor. It was a major advance in browser-based editing when it came out five years ago. If you were to graft the Medium editor onto WordPress and reorganize the commands, you’d really have something. They could address the question he raises by providing a standard “reference release” of WordPress that…

I think the iPhone is simply going to be superior (demand-wise) to these other offerings despite lacking features such as 3G, a real keyboard, etc. Look at the music player market; there are a number of other players that are “better” than the iPod, but they don’t have the same feel, the same interface, the same…”I don’t know…

I just returned from my first CES. Here are my thoughts on the products I saw and the trends I think they represent. Notes I enjoyed seeing the MAVIC drone demoed in person since that’s the one I’ll be getting very soon. The VIVE by HTC is definitely better than the Occulus in my opinion, after trying around…

I was clearing my cache and refreshing a page and accidentally hit an unintended key a moment ago and got the image above. Turns out Safari has a responsive design mode built in. ctrl–⌘–R Giving that keyboard shortcut from the Develop menu (which you need to enable in Safari settings), will give you a view like that above.

I mostly read and don’t watch that much media, but I’ve become interested recently in the battles for digital dominance. I had an idea this morning that I thought was kind of interesting. The concept was that there are only a few components in the future: The client you watch content on. The network you get the content…

For a long time I’ve been all about some Pathogen and Powerline. The former gave me decent plugin management (of which I had about 20), and Powerline is a Python-based status bar for Vim, which gives a nice…well, status bar at the bottom of your files. But I just redid my laptop and my Vim config along with…

A connected lightbulb, such as Phillips’, is setup on WiFi and then shows up as an IP address on the Sisense dashboard. A user determines which KPIs will trigger which available colors.If the daily sales goal is being met, your lamp might shine as a normal white bulb. But if it drops below, the lightbulb might turn red.Source:…

One of the most important things in war is knowledge of what the enemy is doing. Detecting early moves. Countering covert operations. Etc. Another is getting high-value attack forces deep into enemy territory without losing those assets. Drones address both of these issues, and it seems clear to anyone paying attention that drones are the future of war.…

With the rise of interest in Machine Learning there are a couple of different perspectives out there around the similarities between it and Statistics. They generally fall into three camps: “Machine Learning is identical to Statistics! They’re taught the same way, using the same books, using the same math, etc. You can use them interchangeably.” “Machine Learning is…

I got my AirPod’s in-store on launch day after being second in line. The line was around 30 people, so expectations for the things seemed high. Here are some of my thoughts Pros They are extremely comfortable to wear, and are quite easy to completely forget that they’re there. There is virtually no risk that they’ll just fall…

I hate reinstalls. Whether it’s getting a new laptop and having days (really weeks) of burn in time, or migrating a website to a new server and/or host, the process is far more difficult than it should be. And there’s no excuse for it anymore. We have Github. We have Docker. There has to be a better way.…

When Amazon said they were discontinuing the Alexa 1M list (or making it a pay service), I was one of the people wondering if an alternative would appear. Shortly afterward, Cisco stepped up and offered their own free list. I downloaded it and checked it out, and have a problem with it. Here are a few observations: First,…

People remain genuinely baffled by AirPod excitement. They attribute it to fanboys or to a rabid hype with no justified cause. The AirPods seem quite popular, so I’m not the only one who’s noticing that they’re something different. But I think many of them might feel that they’re different but not be able to articulate it. So let…

I’ve been casually following Amazon’s re:Invent Conference announcements and they look quite spectacular. Here’s a quick list of them: LightSail — A new VPS service that competes with companies like Digital Ocean. Elastic GPUs — The ability to attach GPUs to any running VM New F1-branded VMs that are accelerated with FPGAs Athena — A new tool for…

I like looking for great definitions for concepts that people have a lot of confusion or disagreement on. The Internet of Things is definitely one of those terms that qualifies. I like this definition based on the switching role of the computer and the functionality. The Internet of Things The transition from things with functionality having computers in…

I spent a lot of time on the phone with MailChimp support this evening trying to figure out why their editor is so bad. I told them that when I selected a block of text and formatted it as Lato 14, it kind of did something, but it didn’t format it as Lato 14. She explained that if…