When I saw this map after the election I didn’t think about politics. I thought, “Wow, in ten years almost all of those truck drivers can be replaced by self-driving vehicles.”
I’m all for reducing congestion on the interstates — the U.S. population has probably doubled since the interstates were built — but that looks like a lot of people who are going to need to learn a new trade.
I wouldn’t want to use a 9” tablet as a laptop all the time, but sometimes at night I use my Nexus 9 with a Bluetooth keyboard to type some notes or start writing some code I plan to work on the next day. I don’t use many apps, just a decent Android text editor I found.
Pros: Using the touchscreen to scroll and place the cursor. Copy and paste isn’t too bad.
Cons: The small display and keyboard.
(In the image, the word “catain” was supposed to be “captain.”)
Alphabet recently authorized another large stock buyback. Like Google’s previous stock repurchase program, the quantity is a little geeky. :)
(The image comes from this fool.com page.)
ThinkGeek is having a warehouse clearance sale through November 1, 2016. Click the image for all the details:
According to propublica.org, “Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race.” They used a housing ad as an example, as shown in this image.
Marques Brownlee has this really nice comparison of Google Assistant and Siri:
Bill Belichick on Microsoft Surface tablets:
“As you probably noticed, I'm done with the tablets. I've given them as much time as I can give them. They're just too undependable for me. I'm going to stick with pictures as several of our other coaches do as well because there just isn't enough consistency in the performance of the tablets, so I just can't take it anymore.”
I don’t know what his specific issues are, but when I watched him smash his tablet I thought, “I know that feeling.”
I don’t know too much about salting, hashing, and encryption, but it always upsets me when I see a “Your password is too similar to a previous one” message like this, because I assumed that whoever was showing this message was storing my passwords as plain text somewhere. This thread on Twitter, started by Anna Filina, addresses this topic.
The Andromium Superbook is a cool multi-million dollar Kickstarter project. From their website: “The Superbook is a shell that turns your Android smartphone into a complete laptop.”
Yesterday’s Blue Origin in-flight “crew capsule” escape test is extremely cool. If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s an animation of what the test is supposed to accomplish starting just after 3:30, and then the launch is at 51:20. If you get tired of watching the launch, make sure you fast-forward to see the booster landing at the end:
The things people do with Raspberry Pi computers are amazing. This photo shows a cluster of RPI computers someone put together to run Drupal. At some point I hope to put together a similar cluster to run things like Akka and Apache Spark.
Note: I originally wrote this article in 2012.
For a long time I’ve thought the Netflix UI/UX sucks. Their designers don’t seem to understand how I want to use their service, they just seem interested in promoting their “You might like this tv show or movie” algorithm. I keep thinking about buying their stock (which just tanked again to $60), but then the thought comes into my mind, “They’re enamored with their algorithm and architecture, but they don’t understand UX or social.”
After thinking this again last night, I thought about the simple question, “What would Netflix look like if Facebook owned them?” In less than five minutes I came up with the following ideas.
1) Friends make suggestions: First, friends could make movie and tv series suggestions. The Netflix “You might like this” algorithm is okay, but what I’d rather see is suggestions from friends and family who know me.
2) Similar people: I’ve been using Netflix for about two years now, and it would be interesting to see other people who have similar tastes to mine. Again, I could get suggestions from these people, so maybe we have a “Suggestion list from similar users.” I could “follow” these people like I follow people on Twitter. I know I’m getting suggestions from these people already from the Netflix algorithm, but I have no idea who they are.
3) Movie annotations: I’d like to see movie and tv show annotations from my friends, like AMC does with their movies, but from my friends. Imagine my nieces writing, “Uncle Al, make sure you watch X in the next scene,” or friends who really know a lot about movies making notes about how a scene is related to a scene from another movie, or by the same director, etc.
4) Promo clips: Let me make promo clips of movies I like so I can share those with friends. I already do this on Facebook, but I have to copy the movie with one app, then edit the clips down to what I like with iMovie. That’s okay for me, but make this easy so others can do it. (Movie directors and producers: This will help more people see your movie.)
5) My favorites: Let me make a list of my favorite movies and tv series, and share those with other people. I might not recommend that people watch Rashomon or Wild Strawberries, but they would be on this list, where other people could discover them.
6) Movies that inspired directors/producers: Let me see a list of movies that inspired directors and producers of tv shows. I love the old tv show, Northern Exposure, and if the creators of this series told me what inspired them, I’d certainly watch those shows. (And oh by the way, they could tell me about their music inspirations, too.)
As you can see, there isn’t anything magic here — I came up with these ideas in less than five minutes — but I think they’re good ideas. Imagine what a group of people could come up with if they spent time on this? Just look at YouTube and IMDB, and you’ll quickly get many more ideas about what people want to do with video, and know about video.
Besides making for a better experience, they also help tie me into the Netflix service. Right now, I have about ten episodes of Supernatural left to watch on Netflix, and then I’m out of there, unless they have some other content I want to watch. But if they had these social tie-ins, I’d think twice before leaving.
Besides making Netflix a better social website, how about adding in the obvious features:
Basically Netflix has created an on-demand tv station, and if there’s nothing interesting to watch, you just change the channel. But if they had some social aspects to their service, a) it would be a much more interesting concept, and b) I'd think more than twice before leaving.
A few days ago I rebooted my watch, television, and phone.
When I was teenager, that sentence didn’t even make sense.
At Netflix, the consumer is the guinea pig. Well, at least that’s what I got from this article on A/B Testing at Netflix.
According to this pcworld.com story, Intel is stopping production of its mobile Atom processors and quitting the mobile CPU business. “The company is immediately canceling Atom chips, code-named Sofia and Broxton, for mobile devices, an Intel spokeswoman confirmed.”
From their Graffletopia project page: “The Akka project has created the Streams toolkit for creating back-pressured, asynchronous stream processors. Diagramming them out can be quite common, and this stencil is designed to help you do that.”
The unexpected math behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” from TED-Ed.
Fact of the day: During the Manhattan Project, the EMIS facility at Oak Ridge in Tennessee used more power than Canada.
From the book, On Writing Well.
LinkedIn is “funny.” Where Facebook won’t tell you when other people look at your stuff, LinkedIn constantly reminds you, “X number of people have looked at your profile. Just give us some money and we’ll tell you who it was.”
As a quick Nginx configuration example, if you need to configure a 301 Redirect with Nginx, and you also need to account for trailing slash characters in the original URL, I can confirm that this solution works for me:
rewrite /foo/bar/baz/?$ /foo/bar/baz.html permanent;
This Nginx configuration line will forward both of these URIs to the new URI:
/foo/bar/baz # no trailing slash /foo/bar/baz/ # with trailing slash
This works because the ? character means “zero or more instances of the preceding character,” and in this case the character before the ? is the / character.
I don’t know if this is important for a lot of systems, but I just converted a couple of old Drupal websites to use plain, static HTML files, and I needed to make sure I handled the redirect for some URLs that may or may not have had trailing slash characters.
