Category: Amalgamated Scribbles

Games Online for an Online Family Reunion

Part of my family regularly holds family reunions. The reunion scheduled for this summer was revised to be done online instead. Moving meetings and show-and-tell online was pretty straightforward. But how does one play games online and still include those who don’t normally do that (a.k.a. “stereotypical grandma”) and on a very limited budget?

We tried out Steam Remote Play Together, Jackbox Games, and Board Game Arena — all of which support a customer model by which only the game host needs to pay anything or are entirely free.

Tabletopia seemed nice enough to me, but the lack of rules enforcement wasn’t working for our group.
Continue reading Games Online for an Online Family Reunion

Review: 7th Gen Apple iPad

Dear Apple,

I am probably not your typical customer. The previous time I purchased an Apple device, it was a second generation iPod, when those were new. I have not set up a new Apple device since then. I was in need of a self-controlled screen immediately and found that the cheapest option in stock at the local Best Buy was a brand new seventh generation Apple iPad, on sale. This was my experience setting it up:

The user cannot display the wifi password while typing during setup to see why it is incorrect. The time of 8-character passwords is ending and the time of 64-character passphrases has begun; being unable to even have the option to see the password is frustrating.

The popup default/Apple keyboard shows greyed out input options (symbol characters) in grey above the letters, but there is no way to access them without leaving the alphabet board for the numerals and symbols board. Pressing and holding does not grant access to those options (as it does on Android) and instead grants access to alternative European characters. Why even show inaccessible options?

If you try to type quickly instead of one-finger-poking each key slowly, you will find that an “undo” key exists, which wipes all input for the wifi password text field, and it is located directly in place of the right-hand symbol board key. That way if you try to instinctively hit the same spot to switch boards back from symbols to alphabet, you wipe your input. This was not a positive user experience for me.

One of the apps this new device needed was Zoom. Why does the App Store show the developer of Zoom as Meet Happy instead of as Zoom Video Communications?

Not only is it impossible to input a slash ‘/’ (for example, to manually type a URL) without switching away from the alphabet keyboard to the symbols keyboard, but it is also impossible to tap or slide the keyboard input cursor into the middle of text without spaces (for example, to add a space in between two search terms where a space was missed) while in the Safari address bar / search box.

But hey, at least it was the cheapest option. Is that what Steve Jobs wanted?

Social Media, Personal Information, and Children

Time with a child is finite and priceless. Documenting the good times in journal notes, travel photographs, and family videos is a fine way to relive happy memories in your old age. BUT … Do not put them online! And keep the kid(s) off social media as long as possible.

  • The information shared online today will most likely survive well into the future.
  • Peoples’ digital information footprint will affect future people more than today’s data profiles affect us now.
  • Data sent today is likely to be stored by individuals other than the intended recipients,
    • and used for unintended purposes.

These factors combine perniciously to undermine the future freedom and wellbeing of children by burdening them with an information history which they had no informed consent in crafting and that will be used to target them (to influence their behavior commercially and politically) and profile them (to automate judgement of their suitability for educational and financial opportunities).

If our great grandparents made a poor decision which they couldn’t live down, they could move to a new city, state, or country where they were unknown. Information today – every photo, text, and tweet – inescapably follows people from birth to grave; the only escape from the internet is suicide. Social mores and norms are changing faster than they used to and no one is safe from retroactive social opprobrium even if many people are legally protected from ex post facto laws. What might future people think of your children’s Halloween costumes, and what those photos say about the rest of their upbringing?

With technological progress, the information we create today might not be only what we think it is. For example, someone who took and shared a family photo from a crowded beach in the 1990s probably thought they were only sharing their family, but that photo now also encodes the known location and identity of everyone whose face is visible in the photo because of today’s advanced facial recognition technology. Are your photos today accidentally sharing your children’s iris scan, fingerprints, or something else? What might a mortgage company’s machine-learning “AI” think about how many beach photos you’ve shared, or the quality of the grammar in your emails? What might an automated social credit system think of your children’s childhood friends?

Many people today don’t store and process their data entirely on their own; they use “cloud” services to store and use it for them (because these services are much easier, cheaper, and more convenient). However, no information which touches the internet appears safe from theft. And then of course sometimes data is simply given away, or sold to a new third-party, or shared with an unanticipated “partner” or customer.

It’s one thing to take these [almost unavoidable] risks for ourselves as adults in exchange for important financial services and career networking. It’s something else to divulge a child’s data for mere curiosity and amusement – something entirely unacceptable.

 

Some links informing my thoughts on this:

– We Post Nothing About Our Daughter Online |Slate, by Amy Webb

– Don’t post your naked child on social media | Reddit

– Should you invest in your kid’s digital footprint? | Reuters, by Chris Taylor

– How Social Media Is Affecting Your Parenting | Parents, by Mackenzie Dawson

– Why Social Media is Not Smart for Middle School Kids | Psychology Today, by Victoria L. Dunkley

– Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? | The Atlantic, by Jean M. Twenge

– Dear Parents: The Internet Never Forgets / Sharenting: Are Parents Violating Kids’ Internet Privacy? | The Atlantic video, by Taylor Lorenz (YouTube link)

 

– Three challenges for the web, according to its inventor | World Wide Web Foundation, by Sir Tim Berners-Lee
– The web is under threat. Join us and fight for it. | World Wide Web Foundation, by Sir Tim Berners-Lee

– An Apology for the Internet — From the Architects Who Built It | New York Magazine (NYMag): Intelligencer, by Noah Kulwin

– Sean Parker unloads on Facebook | Axios, by Mike Allen
– Sean Parker interviewed by Axios’ Mike Allen Wednesday (video)

– ‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It | The New York Times, by David Streitfeld

 

– The nature of the self in the digital age, by Aral Balkan

– Social-Media Outrage Is Collapsing Our Worlds | The Atlantic, by Conor Friedersdorf
– The Costs and Benefits of Worlds Colliding | The Atlantic, by Conor Friedersdorf

– Why Technology Favors Tyranny | The Atlantic, by Yuval Noah Harari

– The Last Free Generation, by Austin G. Walters

What is Wilderness?

RE: Most Remote Spots in USA Wilderness Complexes | Peakbagger

18.76 miles. You can drive this distance in 15 minutes on a freeway. But it is also the furthest away you can get in the “Lower 48” US states from roads, machines, and motors.

 

How much uninhabited space do you need before it counts as “wilderness“, and what counts as “uninhabited“? Does the backyard of a 0.1-acre property have several square feet of wilderness? Is an undeveloped 0.25-acre plot a quarter-acre of wilderness? If highway traffic can be heard constantly throughout a 1000-acre wetland, or if a 1000-acre woodland has a walking trail, then is that area wilderness? If a particular area of 1000 square kilometers is logged or fished only once a decade, is it wilderness? Is even 100,000 square miles still wilderness if it is filled with radio waves, its skies are routinely flown over, its waters are downstream from the effluent of civilization, its animals are harvested should they ever wander or migrate outside its borders, or microscopic synthetics (e.g. plastics) can be found in every specimen of its ecosystem?