MacBook Pro Song by Erin K

I haven't been posting because I hadn't anything important enough to fill a whole page. I've decided to start posting smaller, light-hearted things. Here ya go.

Poignant due to a recent movie. Notice the ukulele tuning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10P44-kFkZI

Oh, those intrusive running apps

What is with these running apps that want to send all my private data up to their servers??? By running app, I mean any exercise app that records your workout with GPS. However, the ones that I have a problem with are the ones who want to copy all my contacts from my phone. What is up with that?

I think this is particularly an issue with the recent change in Android's flagship messaging app: Hangouts. The recent change is that if you text someone, Android will show the recipient your G+ profile (if you haven't explicitly turned this off). The issue is privacy.

A little background: Earlier this year (or thereabouts), everyone realized that texting (SMS) was a wonderful fallback to someone else not being a member of your social site. "You're on Facebook and want to send a message to someone who's not? Not a problem! We'll just text them...

...but we'll need to see your contact list."

<cue sinister sounding music>



"Oh look! Your friend such-and-such is already on our site! You must be friends so we'll make you friends. Now your estranged relations can know your precise location at all times. You're welcome! :)"

RunKeeper

The king of intrusion is RunKeeper. RunKeeper was the darling of the Pebble watch. Pebble worked together with RunKeeper to integrate a client right into the watch. This is great but the problems show up when you look at the permissions that RunKeeper asks for on your phone:

• "Read your contacts" - This is what we were afraid of. RunKeeper wants to know all your contacts. They want to connect you to everyone (that you know) that's using RunKeeper, or invite them if they're not.
• "Find accounts on the device" - In other words, they want your email address. So they can spam you. But only a little. And they'd never sell the address. Unless they went bankrupt.
• "Use accounts on the device" -  They want you to give them permission to access the other parts of your Google account - G+, Drive, etc. This is scary and unnecessary for a running app.

Nike+

Nike+ is a very popular running app. The trouble is, it's just another social site where the currency is your last workout and your friends.

• "Add or modify calendar events and send email to guests without owners' knowledge" - Seriously??? This is an allowed permission at all???
• "Read calendar events plus confidential information" - hmm, not sure I want my running app to know that I'm going to that doctor...
• "Read your contacts" - Yes, Nike+ suffers from the same disease as RunKeeper.

Noom CardioTrainer

The Noom exercise app was one of the first Android running apps, going back as far as the G1. Their first product had everything that the best apps have today: recording your run or bike ride on a map, allowing you to download it as GPS data, periodic announcements during the run. When CardioTrainer first came out, the only way you could even download your workout data was to have a special code. Nowadays, it wants to share it with everyone. Here are the permissions that it asks for:

• "Read your contacts" - sigh, it's an epidemic.
• "Read call log" - huh? what is this for?
• "Add or remove accounts", "Use accounts on the phone" - I suspect that this is used to send your run up to Facebook but it's still overbearing.

Apps that got it right:

MapMyRun

MapMyRun is another popular running app but here's the worst permission that it asks for:

• "Record audio" - hmm, not sure what it's for but I doubt that they're recording your conversations. I suspect it's used to see if you're on a call or VC or something.

Pebble Bike

Pebble Bike is a little app written by some guys who wanted to see their bicycle speed on their Pebble watches. It has no ability to export your workout, no history, no reminders, no progress bars, no recorded celebrities telling you to run faster. But it does show you your speed and average pace on the watch, which is cool.

Also, it doesn't ask for any risky permissions.

Summary

In summary, I don't mind an app that wants to share all my runs with the people on Facebook. But if I don't want to do that, I'd still like to use the app. For instance, there aren't many running apps that talk to the Pebble watch. I'd hate to have to give up my friends and family just to do that.

I'm also shocked that any running app would share information that could be used by a stalker (or worse.) Would anyone knowingly give out this information?

• female, looks like she's in her 20's from the profile picture
• reliably runs around Such-and-such Park every Monday evening after dusk
• probably wearing very little clothes
• probably not carrying a self-defense weapon due to the weight
• should be getting too tired to run away around such-and-such o'clock...

Scary. Only share with friends, people!

Love my Moto X

What I love about my new Moto X:

• dynamic notifications - Dynamic notification is a feature that causes notifications like email and chat receptions to show up on the sleep screen. (On other phones, it might light an LED or something.) It's handy knowing what the notification is without having to wake up the phone, and it doesn't appear to hurt battery life at all. My favorite part, however, is being able to wake up the phone without pressing the tiny power button.
• trusted devices - A trusted device is any of your Bluetooth devices - car, Pebble watch, etc. - that you have told the phone you trust. While the phone is nearby to it, you don't have to unlock the phone to wake it up. The idea is, if someone steals the phone and it goes out of range of any trusted devices, the phone will lock.
• better battery life - The phone can go 3 days without charging, vs 2 days for my last phone.
• loud, clear speaker

What I dislike:

• no more native SIP - the native SIP client is gone, (I blame Kitkat), have to install my own :(

The messaging app explosion

I've never been a big Twitter-er, mostly because of the lack of privacy, I guess. Or texter, mostly because of the cost. But recently things have happened which made me take note of a bunch of recently new apps.

A bunch of friends started sending me things through Apple's iPhone's iMessage app. It's weird in that, you can select a bunch of people from your contacts and, if they don't have an iMessage account, it will MMS (?) or email them.

This doesn't work well because it doesn't tell me who belongs to each phone number (do you know all your friends' phone numbers?) and replying didn't work either, through email or SMS'ing by hand.

I also noticed that my daughters were doing the same thing. That is, they were group texting. Fortunately, we now have unlimited text messaging so I won't get sticker shock with the monthly bill.

But it made me wonder, isn't there something out there better for group chat? Is SMS really the lowest common denominator? The lingua franca? Yes, I know that SMS isn't that bad, that it's all the third world countries have and that even many people in the US are limited to what their clamshells can send and receive. But surely there is something between iMessage and SMS ???

It turns out that there's something better, but "no one" uses it. XMPP aka Jabber is what both Google Chat and Facebook chat use. It supports group chats and presence notification. "Presence" is where it tells your friends whether you're "away" or not.

The trouble is that, while XMPP is supposed to be "federated", that is, Google and Facebook users are supposed to be able to talk to each other, instead, both Google and Facebook have shut their doors to the other guys. I guess it turned out that they couldn't monetize an open chat protocol so they closed the gates to each other to create their own little "walled gardens".

Broadening our search further, we find more and more "walled gardens". The most popular chat applications out there, by subscriber base, are:

from here: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/best-chat-messaging-apps/

Skype - 300 million
iMessage - 250 million
Facebook - >200 million
Viber - >200 million
WhatsApp - <200 million, $1/yr
Google Hangouts - <100 million

With the exception of Skype (and possibly Hangouts at this time), the others will down convert to SMS if necessary. One of the amazing things I notice is that WhatsApp got so many users despite charging for the service and despite not having an existing user base. While the others don't send ads yet, I guess the threat of sending them, or WhatsApp's features, were enough to get them users without having the gargantuan block of users that, for example, Apple and Facebook have. Hats off to WhatsApp and Viber for being able to compete in the same room as the big guys.

But here's my question: Why is SMS the lowest common denominator? When I receive an SMS, it doesn't say who it's from and it's a pain to reply to a group SMS. Some services like GroupMe create "conference rooms" for you to text in, but this is a hack over a primitive service that is, what? 20 years old?

Additionally, having SMS as a back-up hasn't prevented the fractured market that we have. That is, no one is emerging as the leader. If anything, the field is expanding as chat apps pop-up with unique features like splitting a dining bill or erasing a photo as soon as it's viewed.

Couldn't we go back to supporting XMPP? Then we could see who sent a chat message, we'd have presence notifications, we could send large messages and could do group chat without resorting to MMS.

Hey, big guys, what would be the harm? Is SMS supposed to be painful so that we'll all create an account on your service that we don't want to have anything to do with?

Teen steals alcohol and kills 4 people. "Oopsie". Exonerated.

The best defense attorneys money can buy. They claim parents taught him that there are no consequences for rich people.

I would say the judge taught him that.

http://gawker.com/teen-who-killed-four-people-got-off-on-probation-becaus-1480835092

Where are the flip phone app stores?

My daughter's slide-out keyboard phone died and, instead of getting another one right before Santa might bring one, we got a cheap flip phone for her so she could reach us in the meantime. We got a Samsung T139. Only $20.

The first thing that struck me about it (reminded me, more like, since we used to all have flip phones) was that it was so tiny and light. It's only 2.96 oz versus 4.9 for a typical smart phone. Also, it fits into a pocket trivially, and doesn't stick out (and slide out, sometimes) like a smart phone "tablet". The battery lasts 12 days. That's "days", not "hours".

I wonder why we left such phones, and so quickly. To surf the web and read email? Perhaps but those are not easy to do on a phone, especially writing. I'm certain there was a "coolness" factor involved. We can probably lay some blame on "Angry Birds".

[ In all honesty, map apps are a crucial use for smart phones. The built-in GPS, big screen, strong CPU and data connection make a fairly killer combination. ]

One thing that smart phones let us do is write our own apps. Smart phones are general purpose computers so one can put all kinds of little apps onto them, some that even make sense to put onto a phone. A pedometer, for instance, makes perfect sense to put into a small device that you always carry with you. It doesn't require an extensive user interface. It doesn't even need to upload the data anywhere, but it could.

I've heard that flip phones are making a come back as people migrate their heavy viewing to tablets. I wonder if this would only accelerate if flip phones had "app stores". For instance, one tiny app that I like to have is the OTP generator for my email account. I ported it to my Pebble watch; why can't I put anything on a flip phone? *Does* anyone make an open flip phone? Could we convince Samsung to open theirs?

It vaguely appears that these phones can run Java applets. I don't know if the applets have to come from webpages, or if they can also be loaded locally. There may be hope there; Android uses Java almost exclusively.

A killer feature for flip phones would be the ability to run SIP (either over wifi or cellular data). SIP users tend to be fairly frugal. What's better than a cheap phone on a cheap phone network?

BMW likes me!

BMW knows that I like notebooks!

It's full of graph paper with occasional BMW drawings:

The only problem is: Where's the fountain pen that I'm supposed to use? :( I guess they don't know me that well.