About time. However, though there might have been some improvements, it is still nothing like good enough yet.

I usually work for a few hours with my laptop on battery each day and can normally rely on 6-8 hours of battery life, even with lots of networked apps open, much more if I’m careful. Some days I can go off grid for 10 hours before warnings start to appear.

Yesterday I made the mistake of leaving Chrome running because I had been in a Hangout and forgot to close the app down. The browser-proper was shut, but the Hangouts app kept it running in the background. Apart from that, all I was doing was writing – I was not even browsing the web or checking my email. I got about 2.5 hours before the laptop hit 5%.

Chrome is one of the very few apps that predictably makes my machine fan whir, whether or not I have lots of tabs open. It is the only app I know of that grows if left unattended too – I have several times had to delete it from my system when the app has grown to 2GB or more (it’s because, on a Mac, it retains all of its previous versions in the app itself). Do they not employ smart software engineers at Google? I thought that was kind of the point of their hiring policy.

Hangouts would be an incredibly useful app if it weren’t for its dependence on Chrome. From a technical, usability, functional and connectivity perspective it is far better than Skype, FaceTime, WhatsApp or Viber in almost every way. Seems that there’s a lot of foot-shooting going on here.

Though it did have a bad few years of slowness and bloat, Firefox has been far superior to Chrome for a year or two now and, of course, it is genuinely open, and largely free from commercial interests (I forgive it the integration of Pocket because I really like the service). It runs fast and lean, is highly usable, highly customizable, and solid as a rock.

I also really like Firefox Hello, the Mozilla answer to Skype et al, especially because it does not routinely route my conversations via the DSA, shower me with ads, or invade my privacy. Sadly, from a technical perspective, Hello still feels a little primitive and can be a bit glitchy.  It has a long way to go before it comes close to competing with Skype, WhatsApp, FaceTime or Hangouts and its great strength of not being built explicitly to farm its users also means that it can be harder to set up a meeting: unless you have a Firefox account, you can’t just ad hoc call or message someone. It would be great if more than two people could be in a meeting too.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/3/9257871/chrome-memory-use-flash-pause-restore-tabs

From Creative Bloq, a list of free tools, mostly web-based, for creating infographics. A good range here, from data visualization to diagramming tools and templates.

I’m not a massive fan of the trend towards the indiscriminate use of infographics – it’s much too easy to disguise shallow thinking and inadequate research, and way too easy to fail to pass along things that matter and emphasize things that don’t, making them dangerous for much the same reasons as PowerPoint is dangerous – but, when they are done well, and when they are combined with links to richer sources of information, they can be powerful learning tools.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.creativebloq.com/infographic/tools-2131971

Really fascinating examination of OFTEL figures on recent changes in use of tools and media in the UK, with some intriguing demographic variations showing enormous differences between young and old, and between richer and poorer (barely discernible gender differences). There are extremely clear trends, though, that cut across demographics. Basically, cellphones/tablets (the two categories are blurring) and TCP/IP-based alternatives to familiar media with analogue antecedents (mainly phone, SMS, TV) are rapidly taking over in almost every segment, especially among the poorer and younger demographics, and the change is occurring incredibly fast. Even native digital technologies like laptops are on the verge of disappearing into a minor niche any moment now. And the title of the article picks out one interesting trend: younger people, in particular, would not miss their TVs much. Most would not even notice they had gone.

Address of the bookmark: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/8/10/what-would-you-miss

This is interesting – a fully functional 3D printer for (potentially) under $85. Of course, there are caveats. Though the printer itself seems very capable, even compared with those that cost at least ten or fifteen times as much, a fair amount of skill is needed to build it. Also, it does rely on a fair number of 3D printed parts, so you need to have access to a 3D printer to make one. That said, even if you had to rely on a company to produce those 3D parts for you, and even if you invested in a better printing head than the cheap one described here, it would still be possible to build one of these for a very few hundred dollars. This might not be the perfect solution for schools etc, where reliability and safety are paramount, but it looks like a great alternative for hobbyists wanting to explore Santa Claus machines.

Any moment now, 3D printing looks set to hit the mainstream. I’m still not quite sure what such machines can really do, given their current reliance on PLA or ABS filaments, their slow print speeds, and unreliable operation. I have spent a while browsing Thingiverse looking for projects and have been amused by printable guitars and violins (some glueing and extra components required).  I’ve had a few thoughts about designing bits and pieces like cord organizers, replacement parts for broken devices and instruments, home gadgets, etc, but I have yet to come up with any really compelling use cases that are not more trouble, nor significantly cheaper, than simply buying the things ready made. Most of the objects available on Thingiverse look a lot like uses of Sugru – great fun, ingenious, but embarrassingly amateurish, garish and crude.  And 3D printers are not compact things – you need to put them and their raw materials somewhere. For low-utilization scenarios it’s still more sensible, and not much more expensive, to simply send a design to a 3D printing service.

I feel almost certain that there are educational uses for such things. This is most obviously valuable for kids and those in physical design disciplines (architecture, engineering, interior design, sculpture, etc), and I can think of a few ways of using artefacts to help make concepts more concrete in a physical classroom (physical routers, logic gates, etc, for instance), but I have yet to work out a way to incorporate them into the things I teach online, all of which are conceptual and/or virtual.  I’m hoping that, when I get one, the possible will become more adjacent.

Address of the bookmark: http://3dprint.com/89620/toyrep-3d-printer

Jeff Atwood clearly and coherently explains why connecting to the Internet is scary. It’s especially scary when all of our devices – cars, lights, heating, gas pumps, locks, surveillance cameras, TVs, etc – are connected. Most of us have learned to be at least a bit careful with our computers but we tend to be more careless and trusting of those simple plugin devices. Unfortunately, among the weakest links are our routers and, once owned, it is really hard to escape the malware that controls them. Worse, like many of our devices, their updates and configuration tend to be ignored or forgotten. As more and more devices embed powerful and dangerous net-connected computers, this problem is going to get a lot worse over the coming years. Some good advice in this article on protecting yourself as best you can.

Address of the bookmark: http://blog.codinghorror.com/welcome-to-the-internet-of-compromised-things/

Interesting commentary on the hijacking and usurpation of open protocols by web companies intent on making a profit by closing their ecosystems via non-standard apps layered over HTTP. As Mattheij notes, this is very similar to the way AOL, CompuServe and other commercial providers used to lock in their users. Now, instead of running proprietary systems over layer 2-4 protocols (as AOL et al used to do), vendors are running them over layer 5 (or, for OSI purists, layer 7) protocols, with proprietary APIs designed to hook others into their closed systems (think Facebook or Google logins). The end result is the same, and it’s a very bad result.

Mattheij writes

Please open up your protocols, commit to keeping them open and publish a specification. And please never do what twitter did (start open, then close as soon as you gain traction).

I completely concur.

Address of the bookmark: http://jacquesmattheij.com/aol-20

Well, maybe not everything!

This article contains some interesting and useful information about the current state of the research comparing e-reading vs p-reading. In brief, there are no simple, unequivocal findings. The biggest issues with e-texts apparently relate to the propensity of screen-users to skim and/or be distracted, though there are also issues with knowing where you are in an e-text, which makes it both harder to get the bigger picture of how it all hangs together and more difficult to remember some aspects of what your are reading. On the other hand, there’s good evidence that screens are better for people with some disabilities like age-related sight impairment and dyslexia and the advantages of things like easy search, instant word lookup, shared annotations, variable fonts and, of course, cost and information density, are pretty compelling. In the past I’ve shared some thoughts on some potential solutions to the known problems with e-readers as well as on the relative merits and demerits of each technology. Like all technologies, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. Research like this is useful because it helps to identify design problems that we need to solve, not because it provides definitive answers. I don’t think we are going to see much improvement in paper books in the near future, but there’s plenty to work on in e-reading!

Address of the bookmark: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3048297/evidence/everything-science-knows-about-reading-on-screens

Over the past ten years, the ‘golden triangle’ (the sequence of where people look when viewing Google search results and, indeed, many web pages) has changed to a fuzzy line straight down the left of the page. It used to be that people started on the left, scanned to the right, then moved on down the page – that’s what we have taught in interaction design classes, at least for web designers, for quite a while. Now, they just scroll down. They also make faster (but are they better?) decisions about where to click.

There are clearly many factors that influence this, not least of which being Google’s UI changes, improvements in Google’s algorithms, as well as increasing familiarity with the tools – people are getting better at knowing what to ignore, perhaps less influenced by a lifetime of reading on paper, not to mention the effects of the massive increase in mobile device usage, in which scrolling is pretty much the only game in town. It’s a massively complex self-organizing system and fascinating to see how design and use responsively interact on a web-wide scale. So, now, designers will work on the assumption that people are going to be scrolling down, so that’s what users will learn to do, more and more, and what they will come to expect. But will it last?

It’s intriguing to wonder what will happen next. Though I remain a bit sceptical about wearables like the Apple Watch (at least until battery life gets better and app makers get away from behaviourist models of user psychology), I suspect that might be the next thing to stir up this complex ecosystem. I expect to see more single-glance sites coming soon.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/03/03/how-do-you-google-new-eye-tracking-study-reveals-huge-changes/