Roughly during the fourth rapid fire commercial break my housemate exclaimed:

These ads are really annoying, and I like ads!

We normally don’t watch live TV, but had decided to catch the season opener of Cosmos. We were blown away both by the quantity of unskippable ads and also how poorly they fit together, like someone hit shuffle and called it a day. After the second set of repeat ads we started hitting mute immediately and having a conversation instead. 

People lament ad-ridden websites, but the majority of content now includes targeted and arguably thoughtful advertising. Google with ads on queries that are likely commercial in nature, YouTube videos with a single skippable ad that is often so good it makes me want to watch the entire thing, and Facebook with ads for useful apps. The lack of privacy on the internet can be scary, but at least it’s not annoying.

Recently I finished reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Habit is a great way of framing the actions we take and how we’re able or unable to change them.

In February I started forming a habit as a test to see if I could put what I learned in the book to good use. I started by waking up a little earlier in the morning. My cue was this extra time where I didn’t have anything to do. My routine was a simple set of stretches and writing a blog post. And my reward was the satisfaction of touching my toes and clicking “publish” (not at the same time).

This habit has worked, but in a slightly strange way. I often end up completing only one of the two routines in the morning, and then need to find time later in the day to complete the other. This is probably expected given I only have one cue but two routines and two rewards. 

Phil’s Kitchen, or Phil’s Treasure Pot as it’s known inside, is a confused Hawaiian BBQ/Chinese Restaurant in Menlo Park. With 4.5 stars from Google I was expecting a funky local experience with great food whose weirdness kept people coming back for more. Disappointingly I got decent cheap food with a sub-par experience. Their menu states that they make everything fresh, but then they serve everything in take-out containers, the very antithesis of fresh. Definitely worth the experience (and $6.60 I spent for lunch), but didn’t live up to the hype.

Often discussed barriers to smartphone adoption include price of the phone, price of the data connection, and availability of data networks. Less often discussed, but just as important, how easily damaged a phone is, and how likely it is to be stolen (closely linked with price). Even less discussed, but arguably the most important, is access to power. When I was in Kenya a few weeks ago I asked one of my hosts about the village he grew up in, where most of his family still is. He told me that once a week a truck rolls through with batteries and that is the only time to charge their phones. No smartphone has a week long battery life. Even if I gave his family a phone and data, they still wouldn’t use it much, because pretty soon the battery would die and they would have to wait a week to get a charge. Here, we grumble about solar chargers that take all day to charge a phone. In this village such a charger would be legendary for its ability to provide access to power every single day. Same product, completely different value.

This is a snippet from http://www.cnu.org/highways/sfoctavia

After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the Central Freeway was rendered unsafe for driving. While the calls for its demolition had existed before this time, they had always been resisted as too vital for urban connectivity. It was argued that closure would surely result in unprecedented traffic jams. However, after the earthquake forcibly closed the highway, the congestion failed to materialize. This allowed for planners to seriously consider its removal.  

Today, Octavia boulevard exists where the Freeway once stood. It’s widely considered to be the reason why the Market/Octavia section of the city has improved considerably. It took a shock to the system to discover that the highway wasn’t needed. A takeway: if a shock comes your way, make good use of it.

The Hue starter kit came yesterday and we excitedly set it up. The base station requires a wired connection to the rest of the network which made us realize that all of our devices have been wireless up until now. Our wireless router is mounted on the ceiling for the best range and only has a single cable going to it which carries power over ethernet and a connection to our modem. Everything else hsa been wireless. Rather than mount more things on the ceiling and run more cables up for power we decided to duct tape together a solution involving a second wireless router. This brings us to a total of three – the first router that provides DHCP address, the ceiling mounted router that provides wireless, and the Hue base station that provides wireless to the light bulbs.

I did learn one cool thing through all of this. The Hue light bulbs create a mesh network in addition to talking directly to the base station. So if I try to install a light that is out of range, the answer is add more lights, a strangely pleasing solution.

WhatsApp has seen impressive growth over its few short years of life. 450 million users is impressive, especially given that Facebook itself only has twice that number. Can WhatsApp grow more? I’ve read plenty of analysis that suggests that the best way for WhatsApp to grow next is to add additional services around its core product, rather than go after more users. This seems to suggest that anyone who is potentially a WhatsApp user is already a WhatsApp user, or a user of an alternative service such as WeChat.

WhatsApp in its current form competes with SMS, and wins because it is both cheaper and better. But it relies on a phone that has both apps and data. Most of the world does not have this type of phone, yet. But significantly cheaper communication might be enough to warrant the purchase of a smartphone, even if that phone cost many times a monthly salary. The same was true with basic phones just a few years ago. If WhatsApp plays its cards right it could be the main reason why someone buys a smartphone. That market is easily 3 billion people who all already have feature phones. And this is why Facebook cares. Because WhatsApp is the killer app for smartphone adoption, and smartphone adoption is good for Facebook.

Recently I discovered the route.io framework for home automation. It is composed of a minimal core that provides standard ways for interacting with endpoints and a few dozen modules that support various hardware such as Sonos, Nest, and Hue. I am normally dismissive of home automation because it feels like the ultimate in small gain for large effort, and incredibly geeky gains at that. But I’m more excited after listening to the route.io guys talk about using their framework to create a universal remote, and collecting voice & other data via old smartphones. There is some seriously cool stuff that can be done if your home understands presence and people. So I splurged with my housemates and bought a Philips Hue starter kit with 3 bulbs and a base station. Combined with route.io and a Raspberry Pi we should be well on our way to home automation nirvana.

This is the first dedicated camera I’ve had in six years. Purchased in a rush just before heading off to Kenya, the NEX-5T has a huge sensor and can capture some spectacularly good photos. As with most cameras, it can also capture some spectacularly bad photos. It sometimes has trouble with focusing correctly (often user error), and the automatic modes tend not to produce good night photos. One nice feature is the ability to have selective manual control over either the aperture, shutter speed, or iso setting while allowing the rest of the camera to stay in auto mode. This is great for macro shots where you can control how much of the image is in focus, and for nighttime when you’re willing to bump up the light & graininess.  

Overall I’m very happy with the NEX-5T, and I’m excited to try out some other lenses.

Hell’s Gate, Kenya

Masai Mara, Kenya

Masai Mara, Kenya

Stinson Beach, CA

Stinson Beach, CA

Masai Mara, Kenya

I do best focusing on one thing at a time. This is directly at odds with recent technology, which has more ability to interrupt than ever before. To combat this I’m trying to establish habits which help prevent distraction, for example a habit of not checking work email before leaving the house, and a habit of keeping my laptop closed while in a meeting. The benefits appear minimal in the moment but compound up over time.

I saw the Lego movie with my flatmates tonight and loved it. Apparently this came out weeks ago, but I’ve been living under a rock and hadn’t heard of it. The dynamism of the animation is very impressive considering it still ‘feels’ like a Lego creation. And the characters manage to come to life with hardly any facial expressions or gestures. This one will be hard to top.

This morning, my muesli told me that it was not a low-calorie food. I found this entertaining, but also a refreshingly honest take on the “health food” packaging it employed.

In Kenya many people work in the city and periodically send money home to family in rural villages. They first visit a shopkeeper in Nairobi and deposit cash in exchange for virtual currency in their M-Pesa account. This is sent by mobile phone to a family member, who then withdraws it for cash as needed. This is incredibly advanced given that basic infrastructure like water and power is severely underdeveloped. There are essentially two reasons why M-Pesa succeeded.

• Everyone could use it instantly

• It was far cheaper and safer than the existing solution

It was instantly usable because it piggybacked on top of the existing Safaricom network of cellular towers and salespeople. 70% of Kenyans have phones and Safaricom has a greater than 98% market share, which means essentially everyone could use M-Pesa. 

It was far cheaper because paying a 7% transfer fee on 500 shillings much better than paying 200 shillings to take the bus to accept the payment. And far safer because your money is secure even if your phone is stolen (thanks to a PIN). Theft frequently occurs, so this is important.

Similar solutions are struggling to gain traction in other East African countries such as Uganda, which have a similar need for familial money transfers but don’t have the carrier monopoly. Being cheap and safe wasn’t enough. Distribution was key.

This chart shows the growth of electric vehicle charging stations, based on data from http://developer.nrel.gov/. Notice that in the last three years the growth rate changed dramatically. It also appears to be linear growth.

I read two sobering security articles this morning. The first describes a  serious flawthat existed for over a year in Apple’s SSL/TLS implementation that allows for man in the middle attacks. This is scary because it existed for so long and because in theory it should have been detected automatically by anyone running a man in the middle penetration test. The second is an article from the economist that describes a method of figuring out a cryptographic key from the sounds that a computer’s internal components make while decrypting emails. The attack vector an acoustic crack is most likely a piece of software that (legitimately or illegitimately) gains access to a user’s microphone and uses it to obtain the key used to sign data.

Send a snap! The photo will be low quality and you can’t get a “like”.

But you sent it, and that’s the point. If it had been a text you might worry your meaning was lost. If it had been an instagram, your employer might find it ten years from now.

But you can’t regret the snap, at least not for more than a day or so. You probably won’t be able to remember it three days from now, and your friend certainly won’t remember it three weeks from now.

The friction is gone, the worry is gone, and that’s why you sent the snap.