So many of my friends are brewing beer these days that I am always worried I will end up an alcoholic. Someone has to drink all the beer they are brewing :)
But it all started with this schoolteacher, Charlie Papazin back in the 70s in Boulder, Colorado..
Automation and AI is now filtering our resumes and deciding how you proceed through a job interview process. It’s time to rethink how you build your resume. Interactive bots are now filtering initial interview questions and candidates are creating video replies to stock answers…
In the age of TikTok will you be judged by your 7 second video clip ?
You would think that naming a product "Remarkable" is almost setting it up for ridicule. But it's not very often that a gadget so perfectly fits the job it's meant to do that it lives up to its name. Indeed, having used the Remarkable writing and reading tablet for over three years now, I can assure you that it is one of those gadgets.
I bought the Remarkable tablet when it launched back in Oct 2017. I have been using it daily since then. It has completely transformed my note-taking and book-reading — to the point that I have donated all my beautiful paper notebooks, Field Notes, Bullet Journals, and assorted swag conference diaries to my kid's school. I am paper-free.
The Remarkable tablet is a simple computer with an A4 paper sized e-Ink display. With just this description, it sounds like a large Kindle. Yes, you can also read books on it. But what makes it stand apart from the Kindle is that you can write on it.
And when I mean write, it feels like writing on paper. This fantastic experience is due to the rough paper-like texture of the display cover and the passive stylus with a plastic nib that wears down like a pencil. The tablet thoughtfully comes with five spare stylus nibs.
The paper-like experience is so real that it makes a scratching sound when you write on it, just like paper. The feel is very textured and rough, akin to a graphite pencil on sketch paper.
This feature alone would have sold me on the benefits of the tablet. But there's more.
The tablet runs a custom version of Linux called Codex on an ARM chip. It has 8GB of internal storage that's equivalent to about storing 100,000 pages of text. Trust me, if you can write 100,000 pages of notes, plans, stories, etc., you are in the wrong career. You should be a full-time writer.
The Codex OS on the tablet is a beautiful example of a user interface done right. It is intuitive, fast, and reliable. The tablet has never crashed or misbehaved in my three years of use.
Due to the low power e-Ink display, the battery easily lasts a week or more. Charging is quick through a micro-USB connector so you can use the same one that charges your multiple devices at home.
The tablet supports three core formats: Notebooks, PDFs and eBooks in the DRM free ePub format.
Notebooks are for things you create yourself. Sketches, bullet journals, daily diaries, ToDo lists, lecture notes — you can create all these in one notebook or have individual ones for each writing type.
The Notebook feature comes with over 50 templates of different types of page formats: pages with small, large dots for bullet journals, Day Planner format, Week plan format, ruled lines of various widths and sizes, squared pages for sketching or Math – the Remarkable team has pretty much thought of everything.
You can have a different page format for every page in your single notebook. Or you can create notebooks with different formats. And you can easily move pages within a notebook or to different notebooks. This feature is useful when you start taking notes quickly and later on want to categorize them.
You can transfer your eBooks and PDFs to the tablet using the companion app. Reading books on this tablet is a joy as you have a larger size than the Kindle, and you can annotate any page of any ebook or PDF with your stylus. These annotations will persist and sync across your devices through the app. Friendly page-turning swipe gestures on the screen, and hard buttons to advance or go back pages make it easy to navigate a book.
The writing features also has a few neat functions. The most basic one is UNDO. You have infinite Undo capability, so if you want to fix any squiggle, you can undo one stroke at a time. If you're going to erase many strokes or a large portion of the page or the entire page itself, you are better off using the Erase feature. The Erase feature allows you to erase like a pencil eraser, or draw a shape around the strokes/writing you want to delete, and it will erase everything within that closed shape.
You can duplicate anything you write or sketch - which is handy for quickly creating patterns or bullet points or templates. Again, circle the writing or drawing you want to duplicate, tap on the '+' icon on the selection rectangle, and drag the duplicated material to another spot on the page.
If you are like me and can't sometimes recognize your handwriting due to a lack of practice since we all type on our devices now, Remarkable also has handwriting-recognition built into the tablet. You can choose a page or entire notebook and convert the text and symbols into digital text and symbols. The accuracy is over 95% and very reliable across a range of handwriting. You get the converted notes as a text file sent to your email. Very convenient and easy to use.
Besides these basic writing features, if you are an artist, this tablet will replace your daily sketchbook. It has Pencils, Pens, Brushes with varying thicknesses of nibs & strokes. You can create layers (like PhotoShop) and have a rich canvas that allows you to create some spectacular art, like these from the @remarkable Instagram account.
The tablet connects to WiFi. But don't think you will be able to browse the internet on this. The WiFi is strictly for syncing the content from the tablet to your mobile or desktop devices through an extremely functional companion app available on macOS/Windows and iOS/Android. The app allows you to sync content across your tablet and your mobile & desktop devices. You transfer PDFs and eBooks to the tablet by loading them first in the app and then automatically sync to the tablet.
The ability to not get distracted by notifications, browsing, email, or other apps makes this tablet spectacular to focus on the task at hand — be it writing, taking notes, sketching or reading books. This non-feature alone is worth the price of admission.
I want to highlight the beautiful visual experiences that the Remarkable team has created on every customer-facing aspect of the tablet, the user interface, their website, and their app. The design is typically Scandinavian, as the Remarkable team is in Oslo, Norway. You can very clearly see the Scandinavian design influence of pure, clean, functional design that delights. It's what I would expect the evolution of the current Apple design aesthetic. This product straight up seems like an Apple product from the future.
Every time I take my tablet out for reading or taking notes in a company meeting or with friends, the first thing people exclaim is "What's that ?". Then, I give them a run-through of all the features and then invite them to pick up the stylus and write on it themselves. Within the first few seconds of writing or drawing on it, their face cracks open into a wide smile as they realize how close it is to writing on paper. It's something you have to experience for yourself. Many of my friends and colleagues have subsequently purchased one for themselves and are enjoying the benefits of going paper-free.
This tablet could revolutionize the school and college experience for students. They won't have to spend on expensive paper notebooks and textbooks. If the schools and colleges invest in these tablets and provide all the textbooks in eBook form on the tablet, the productivity and cost benefits will surpass the cost of the tablet in no time. Remember, no internet distractions on this device so it can be safely used inside a classroom.
Many industries and markets could benefit from this: healthcare professionals, law enforcement, lawyers, government officials, and workplaces with a lot of paperwork required for reading, writing, and sharing. This tablet is as green as it gets.
And now, after three years, Remarkable has announced version 2 of their beautiful tablet. This new version looks fantastic and has an elegant polished look and feel. With an aluminum casing, it is thinner than the first version, with longer battery life and a stylus with an eraser at the opposite end - just like a regular pencil. And they also upgraded the connector to a USB-C, so it works universally with all your latest devices.
Remarkable 2.0 - Photo by remarkable.com
The benefit of introducing the new version of the tablet extends to the old version. You can now buy version 1 for 20% off for a new one and 27% off for a refurbished one. These are some great deals for a device that will pay itself over many times.
I have already ordered the version 2, being delivered sometime in July this year. Expect a followup to this review focused on version 2 of the tablet in August.
They weren't kidding when they named their device Remarkable. It truly is...
This is an amazing story of Potosí - the first global city populated by the most diverse collection of humans from around the world, almost 350-400 years ago in Bolivia.
I love reading these long articles of history. They provide a lot of perspective and knowledge that you can apply to your everyday life, particularly studying the decline of Potosí…
The end came not as spectacular implosion but as irreversible decline. Lower taxes and the imposition of a harsher labour regimen lifted silver production in the later 18th century, but the mines were deep and mercury expensive. Technological fixes failed.
What a fantastic display of absolute perfection. From NASA and SpaceX we get the first commercial human spaceflight aboard the Falcon 9 workhorse. Crew Dragon capsule, renamed to Endeavor by Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken smoothly docked with the ISS Saturday morning. Within an hour they opened up the vestibule and clambered aboard the ISS welcomed by the current Commander, Chris Cassidy.
Doug & Bob join Cmd. Chris Cassidy, Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner aboard the ISS.
And to give you a perspective of how busy the ISS is today, here’s a shot of 5 spaceships docked at the ISS today.. how’s that for an episode of Deep Space Nine ? 😀
It's 4 pm and you hear that dreaded cry from your kid's bedroom. "Daaaaaad... the WiFi is not working...".
For any parent these are now the most feared words, as we hunker down together through this period of being grounded by an infinitesimally small virus.
In happier times (any date before March 13, 2020 😂) we would have ignored the cry or asked our kids to "Come out here in the study where the router has a better signal..".
Saying that now, will only cause you parental shame.
But there is a better solution. It's called "mesh networking" and has been around for a few years now. Mesh networking allows you to blanket your house with strong wifi signals using wifi transceivers at targeted areas around the house.
These are not "WiFi Extenders" or "WiFi Access Points". The new mesh network devices are a sophisticated version of these extenders where they offer various key benefits like transparently handing over connection to the nearest mesh network device and beam-forming to individual devices as well.
This results in a strong WiFi connection between your phone, tablet or laptop to the mesh device nearest you as you move from room to room in your house.
The pioneer in this field has been a company called "Eero". They were founded in 2015 and launched the first user friendly mesh network router set. The entire product experience was like an Apple product, including the pristine white color of the devices.
Being an exceptionally early adopter (to my wife’s eternal chagrin), I immediately bought them and have been using them for almost 4 years now. Never again have we had any wifi coverage issues in our house or even in our backyard/frontyard.
My first generation Eero next to my AirPods Pro and Magic Mouse for comparison.
Eero were very successful and soon were scooped up by Amazon in 2019.
They are now in their third version of their hardware and now offer consumer and small business configurations.
I would highly recommend their beautiful 3 piece consumer set.
You plug one into your cable or DSL modem and then set it up with their really cool mobile app. You can then setup the other two devices at strategic locations throughout your house. The app will guide you to where the signal strength is best. If you have a large area to cover you can buy more of these devices.
Once these are setup they provide strong wifi coverage through out your house. But wait, there's more.
The Eero app also provides simple features to monitor and restrict access to the internet for all devices that connect to the wifi. That means you can target your kid's devices, set them up in a profile and then collectively turn them on or off with a single tap from anywhere in the world.
So for instance if your kid, Katie, has a phone and tablet, you can link those two devices to a profile, say "Katie". Then you can set access times for Katie. So she gets to user the internet from 8 am - 10 pm every weekday and 7 am - 11 am on weekends. Or if she is not doing their chores then you can "ground" them from the internet with a single tap.
In addition, Eero also has a monthly subscription called "Eero Secure" to monitor and block ads and harmful sites from your entire network !
So everyone in the house connected to the WiFi running on Eero with Eero Secure turned on will not see most ads on websites or apps. This alone is worth the price of admission..
So what are you waiting for ? Get a Eero mesh network and stop those dreaded cries bemoaning the poor wifi signal and be the cool parent who forever solved the wifi problem…
Sometimes I am on my patio working on a simple enough project, say fixing the InstaPot lid that my wife inadvertently left too close near the stovetop burner and it melted part of the plastic lining. So now the lid won't close. My expert analysis lead me to believe that all it required was a bit of sanding and buffing with my trusty Dremel.
So I setup the InstaPot lid and Dremel kit on my patio table and then looked around for a power socket. The nearest one was too far for the Dremel wire and I didn't want to lug out an extension cord.
Luckily I have this amazing portable power source powered by a humungous lithium-ion battery. My friends, meet Jackery - the 240Wh battery pack that provides 110V/200W of pure since wave AC power. You can plug in one 110v appliance and it has 2 USB ports along with a 12v car port.
It's too good to be true. You can use it for all sorts of low power appliances (less than 200W) around the house and it's a fantastic power source for going camping and hiking. No messy gasoline generators to worry about.
This power pack can also be charged by a solar panel sold separately. Now you are truly free and off the grid.
So I plugged in my Dremel and few minutes later had sanded the melted lining of the InstaPot lid. Voila! The lid closes safely. I have used my Jackery for various tasks around the house and in my backyard.
We also take it to the beach where it can charge everyone's iPhones, iPads and keep a small drinks cooler running through the day keeping our beers cold.
It looks beautiful and is extremely well made. A solid piece of equipment that will last you for a long time.
Get one today and enjoy the freedom it provides.
Highly recommend: 5/5
If like me you spent your late teens and early twenties in the 1980s, playing this amazing game called “Prince of Persia” then you will really admire the effort it took for another 20 year old named Jordan Mechner, half way across the world from me in India, to build this game painstakingly frame by frame.
The first time you saw the Prince jump in one fluid motion and land with bent knees you knew this was something exceptional - because, this was on bitmapped graphics on low powered CPUs in the late 1980s. It originally was developed and ran on an Apple II running CP/M or ProDOS and was written in 6502 assembly language.
Gameplay on IBM PC - animated gif from Wikipedia.
I was in college studying computer engineering, at the time I first saw the game. I was hooked instantly and got the game on a floppy. My classmates and I spent hours playing and replaying every level until we got to the Princess after fighting the nasty Vazir and a bunch of his hooligans along the way. Even though there were only 12 levels we felt that it took forever to get to the top of the tower and rescue the princess.
Now you can read Jordan Mechner’s journal of how he single handedly created this amazing creative work for the ages. The game has been ported onto almost all gaming and computing platforms since it launched and you can even get it on your iOS or Android device.
The book is a revelation. He actually filmed his younger brother in various poses that the Prince character would do and rotoscoped the animation so that it looked lifelike. Very honestly written, Mechner's journal shows a rawness in thought and boldness in approach on how to solve complex problems and achieve slow but steady progress daily.
It took him almost 3 years to perfect the game and when finally released in 1989, he was completely burnt out.
The journal should be an inspiration for every young person in college or starting out their career on how to overcome challenges in life and stick to your passion. It also is a lesson on how to achieve extreme focus and not give up.
But the most important lesson is about keeping a daily journal. You never know when that could become a published book ! I use the Day One app to keep a daily journal. More on that in another post soon.
The saying goes that everyone has one book, one movie, one game, one big achievement in them. This was Mechner's. And it certainly lasted the sands of time… 😀
Now that everyone is a Zoom video star, there are times when you need that professional static steady shot of your quarantine face. Too many meetings are beset by jittery video as participants try to adjust their phone, tablet or laptop cameras in unwieldy positions, often looking like the nauseating shots from the Blair Witch Project.
The easiest way to get a professional looking steady video shots is just to invest in a good stand for your mobile device. The one that I really like is this CamKix Tripod that also comes with a BlueTooth remote control. The stand can accommodate various phone sizes and fits my iPhone 11 Pro Max comfortably. That's the widest device that will fit this stand.
For your tablet such as an iPad or iPad Pro, there is the Viozon iPad Pro stand. It has two clamps for a small and a large iPad size. I am using this with my 12" iPad Pro and it almost looks like a cute little iMac.
Once you have these stands, all your video calls will be steady as a rock and you can sit comfortably anywhere. Not only that, now you can get a straight on face shot without the camera looking up your nose hairs or your double chin.
These stands also double up as viewing stands to binge watch your favorite Netflix show. My wife now prefers the iPad Pro on the stand over the large TV in our living room. She can sit outside in the yard or her favorite chair in our bedroom and binge away.
Often, the simplest solutions are the best ones.
UPDATE: Today’s DEMO-2 launch has been scrubbed due to inclement weather down range. Next launch window is May 30, Saturday at 3:22 EDT.
We are launching astronauts from Pad 39A again ! After almost 10 years, NASA and SpaceX collaborate to send astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the iSS from the Falcon 9 spacecraft.
Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon on launch pad 39A at Cape Canaveral Pic courtesy @spacex
They are all suited up in their new beautiful movie like spacesuits. I can imagine a lot of kids around the world are making their own copy-cat spacesuits for cosplay and launching their own imaginary expeditions to space.
Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley. Pic courtesy @airandspace
I have not been this excited since I saw the SpaceX Falcon 9 booster land itself back onto their launch pad. That was a surreal moment. And this launch today is just giving me the chills.
It’s a go for launch at 4.33 EDT. Watch it live here. 🤞 🚀
UPDATE: Today’s DEMO-2 launch has been scrubbed due to inclement weather down range. Next launch window is May 30, Saturday at 3:22 EDT.
Now that we are in the second decade of the 2020 Quarantine Lockdown, there have been many moments when the family has come to blows. Over things like chores, work spaces and the perennial question of what should we all watch on TV together ?
If by some miracle the family decides on a common movie to watch, then begins the struggle for the remote. Having deadened my ears in my teenage years through aggressively loud listening of heavy metal music and many rock shows that exceeded even Disaster Area levels, I tend to turn up the TV volume as high as I can. This tends to aggravate my family beyond belief. 🤷🏽♂️
But technology to the rescue. A few years ago I got this amazing set of over the ear headphones that connect wirelessly over RF to your TV via a receiver. You can then pair up to 4 headphones with one receiver. Voila! Instant personal volume control.
You can get the first set of headphones with the transceiver and then buy individual headphones as required. One transceiver supports up to 4 headphones. Since the connection is over Radio Frequency (RF) and not Infra-Red, these will work throughout your house. So as you get up for a snack or go to the bathroom, you can still hear the TV audio where ever you go. The range is quite exceptional.
This has solved many issues at our house. When our kids were younger and slept early, my wife and I could watch the TV without disturbing the little ones since we both had individual headphones. We also convinced our older parents to get these and now they are enjoying the benefits of individual volume control without waking up the neighborhood.
Another great benefit is that you can actually hear all the background audio, the whispers and the soundtrack of the program you are watching. This adds an immersive layer of aural experience to your TV watching. We watched the entire run of Game Of Thrones with these headphones and immensely enjoyed the aural scapes.
Highly recommend: 5/5
It was Macworld Jan 2008. Again in Moscone Center SFO. Steve announced the MacBook Air. The keynote was electric as Steve pulled out the Air from a yellow envelope. It was a dramatic performance.
After the keynote as the audience filed out, I ran towards the stage. I had heard a tip from a photographer that after the keynote, Steve comes back on the stage to do some photo-ops for the journalists/press photographers after the audience leaves.
Sure enough after the hall was mostly empty, Steve came out with the MacBook Air. The photographers went crazy. He was initially holding the Air in front of him with both hands. I was taking pictures from two or three rows from the stage. I was being blocked by taller photographers in front, so I decided to stand up on the chair and take some pics.
The moment I stood up on the chair, Steve looked up straight at me since now I was much taller than the photographers around and at stage level.
I signaled to him to raise the MacBook in one hand using the tips of his fingers only. He looked puzzled initially but after demonstrating to him with my hand and holding my camera up, he got the point.
He smiled and raised the MacBook Air on the tips of the fingers of his right hand. That created the perfect photo for the lighter than air MacBook. He looked back at me and smiled a thank you.. I just kept on clicking away..
The two-handed photo op...
And now the one handed iconic shot...
Later, again while roaming the Macworld exhibit floor as I was coming up on the Apple booth, I turned and there was Steve standing in front of me. Just like that. This time he had no gaggle of reporters or people around him. He was walking alone and undisturbed.
He looked at me and looked away and then looked back again. He smiled and then said ‘It’s you again…’
He had recognized me even after the switcher campaign had been over for over 5 years. He shook my hand again and said ‘Thank you’. He kept saying ‘Thank you’ a couple of times and then walked away.
I was again dumbstruck and left spouting gibberish…
Steve was many things to many people. To me, he was something to aspire to. I hope I can make a dent in the universe...
It was Jan 2005. MacWorld expo in SFO, Moscone Center. I had somehow convinced my then boss to send me to Macworld even though my job had nothing to do with Macs. I remember standing in line for the keynote and running in to catch a seat as near as possible to the stage. The lights dimmed and Steve walked out on stage. That was the first time I saw him physically. He introduced the Mac Mini and the iPod Shuffle at that keynote. After the keynote I wandered around the show floor checking out the exhibits and generally enjoying the Apple geekfest.
As I was walking around to the Apple booth, I heard a hubhub in the distance and saw a crowd of people moving towards me. I moved to the left to swerve from their path and as the crowd surged around me, I was being gently pushed away. I turned and saw a woman shooing me away. I looked behind her and there was Steve. I said to the woman (who turned out to be Katie Cotton, Apple’s PR chief) and said ‘Hey, it’s me the switcher’.
And she said ‘Yeah honey, everyone here is the switcher’.
‘No, look at me,’ – I urged her. She finally looked at me (instead of through me) and a glint of recognition appeared in her eyes.
She turned around and said ‘Steve, look who is here’.
Steve turned and looked and me and said ‘Hey its you.. Our iPhoto switcher’ and extended his hand. I shook his hand and the media around us erupted in a frenzy of shutter clicks. They were probably wondering who the hell was Steve shaking hands with ?
I was too dumbfounded. I barely managed to stutter ‘Hi Steve.’ And he said ‘Hey thanks a lot for doing that for us. I really appreciate it.’
Now I was plain embarrassed. Why the hell was Steve Jobs thanking me ??
He spoke a few more sentences that I don’t remember.
I was too fucking stunned.
I whimpered out some gibberish and then he was gone. I didn’t even have the presence of mind to give my camera to someone to take our pictures. So then I followed him and lamely took some pictures of him admiring the iPod Shuffle and hanging out with John Mayer. He was gone in a few minutes… and I was on cloud nine all week…
Steve expounding the features of the iPod Shuffle with the lanyard...
Steve having fun with a kid blogger/reporter...
I was too embarrassed to get a selfie.. This was 2005 BI (Before iPhone), so I aimed my Canon point and shoot over my shoulder and clicked...
It was the summer of 2002. I had just joined the San Gabriel Valley Mac User Club (SGVMUG) in Pasadena because in late 2001 I had switched to a Mac. For all my friends that know me well, this was a major shift, since until 2000 I was a firm believer and evangelist of Linux. In fact I came to the US in 2000 to setup moreLinux, Inc. making Linux desktop apps. So for me to switch to a Mac was considered by my friends and colleagues as treasonous and also foolhardy. Because this was 2001 and the Mac had a 4% market share. No one but eccentric people and graphic designers used Macs then.
But the day I saw Mac OS X running and I opened a Terminal window and dropped down to the shell and ran a few Unix commands, I saw the future and immediately went back home, sold my PC’s and bought a blue tower Mac G3. My wife thought I had gone crazy since I made her forcibly switch to the Mac as well.
I soon found the SGVMUG group online and started going for their meetings at the Pasadena Central Library. It was fun to hang out with fellow geeks and Mac-heads. Most of the group was much older and also much wiser. A few of them were genuine rocket scientists from JPL/Caltech nearby. It was a great group and to this day I am good friends with all of them and still go for their meetings when I can.
So one day in the summer of 2002, at one of our meetings, a guy showed up with a handycam. He said he wanted to talk to folks who had recently switched to Macs. So a couple of us went with him to a nearby restaurant and he interviewed us in turn and video-taped the interview. I remember being very excited about iLife and how it had changed the way I took photos and listened to music. We spoke for a couple of hours after that and went home.
I forgot about that incident but a few weeks later I got a call from the guy. He asked me point-blank, ‘Do you want to do a commercial for Apple ?’.
I thought I had died and gone to heaven…
So the next week I drove down to Hollywood Center Studios in Los Angeles. I was introduced to Errol Morris, the Oscar award winning director of documentary films and many awesome commericals. Then I was sent to make up. That was at 9.30 am. The long wait began. Lunch was awesome with craft services going overboard with too much food. It was a long afternoon. Finally at 6.30pm I got the call to report on set.
Nervously, I went down to the set. It was this blindingly white set with everything, including the floor painted white. I remember talking to a painter hanging around the set with a bucket of white paint and brush and his job was to apply touch-ups to places that got smudged by touching or walking.
Anyways, I got in front of the camera. The setup was quite complicated. I could see the director’s face projected onto a mirror on top of the camera. The director was off-camera in a room to the side. He could see me on the monitor and I could see him in the mirror above the camera. The effect was that I was looking straight into the camera and talking to him.
Errol started asking me questions. No script. Just questions and answers. Why did I switch to Mac ? What did I like about the Mac ? Why now ? What do I do with my Mac ? Etc. It went on for at least 30 minutes. Finally he called for a break and called me to his viewing room. I went over and started chatting with him. He was happy with my answers. Then I asked him if he wanted to see a photo-book I had made using iPhoto of my recently born daughter Tanya. He asked me to get it immediately. I ran back to the makeup room and pulled out the photo-book thanking my stars that I remembered to impulsively shove it in my backpack as I left the house.
I showed the book to him and after turning a few pages, he said ‘Get back on camera with the book’. So the set was turned back on again and this time I showed the book to the camera. It had pictures of baby Tanya and Hoofrish. The set loved the unscripted enthusiasm I had about that book and I got an ovation after the camera was turned off. Even Errol said that this was the best audition they had seen so far. I later learned that there were more than 50 other switchers like me invited that day for filming.
I returned home feeling excited and anxious to find out if I made the cut.
A couple of weeks later the rep from the ad-agency (TBW/ChiatDay) called and said ‘You are in. Steve liked you a lot.’
Holy crap! Steve liked me ??
So I pressed him for details and he said Steve saw your audition and instantly decided I was going to be in the campagin. It seems he liked the story of the photo-book a lot. I had to go in again to a recording studio and record the voiceover in the end. That’s the first time I saw the full ad. It was hair-raising… To know that Steve had seen that ad and chosen me from amongst the 50 or more switchers. I couldn’t believe that was happening to me.
The ad debuted during the 2002 US Open Women’s finals. I remember being glued to the set and during every break watching and watching. Finally after the fifth or sixth ad break the screen cleared to white and there I was in that green shirt (that I still have) talking about why iPhoto is so cool.. and showing the world the photos of Tanya and Hoofrish. I was dumb-founded. That ad played again almost 5-6 times during the tennis match. Over the next week it was being played on every major network channel ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN and I started getting calls from old friends demanding what the hell was I doing shilling for Apple on TV !!
Soon every Apple store (there were a few back then in 2002) had a giant 8 foot tall poster of mine in the window. The Apple website had my photo on the home page. Things were getting too surreal. The campaign lasted for almost six months and then new ‘switchers’ were introduced. I was enshrined forever on the Internet on Youtube. My 15 minutes of fame were up…
Apple "Switch" commercial featuring Gautam Godse (2002)
Apple Store, The Grove, Los Angeles Oct 2002
My iPhone camera is becoming my biggest problem. And I am sure you have the same problem as well. We are taking too many damn photos everyday.
We are literally creating matter from light. Think about it. We take a photo using light, on our phone. That photo resides on the phone for a few minutes. It is then uploaded to the cloud and now stored on a server hard drive (matter). The cloud company is constantly buying new servers and new hard drives to store our mostly crappy photos seemingly forever. Light is now turning into matter at an unprecedented rate.
So the billion dollar question is, how do we manage these photos ?
I have tried various solutions over the years. I started with iPhoto in 2002 and pretty much have stuck with it since then. A couple of short quick forays in trying Lightroom and Aperture convinced me that I just needed iPhoto. Apple then launched several web services over the years to help manage, share and backup photos - iTools, .Mac, Mobile Me and finally iCloud. I stuck through them all. My photo library survived, though collected a few scars along the way.
My cloud library was relatively small until the iPhone 4 came along. About 25,000 digital photos since 1999. But after the iPhone 4, taking photos became a daily, almost hourly activity. My digital collection suddenly exploded and I had to find a way of storing these now 100,000+ photos somewhere safe. Along with a hard drive based backup, I needed to find a cloud storage location for universal access across all my devices.
So I tried every cloud photo service that came along: Everpix, Loop, Trunk, PictureLife, Flickr, Picasa, Amazon Photo, iCloud Photo Library and now Google Photos. I gladly paid the fee for the highest storage tiers each service offered. For naught.
Everpix shut down a few months ago. Loop, Trunk are ok for backup but no smarts. PictureLife has a few good options for smart searching and I like their organization better. If only they would add a calendar for their Time search. Flickr, Picasa are too unwieldy for daily use. Amazon Photo is the best solution for backing up since they offer unlimited storage for Prime members. Google Photos compresses your images if they are larger than 16 megapixels but offers unlimited storage for free. Joanna Stern over at WSJ has a good review of Google Photos. Currently I am unable to upload my iPhone photos using the Google Photos app due to some bug - Brad Horowitz, the VP for Streams, Photos & Sharing at Google, personally replied to my frustrated tweet. I guess they are pretty serious about getting things fixed.
That leaves iCloud Photo Library. It's the default solution for iPhoto and it works fine. Mostly. The most useful tier costs $4 a month for 200 gb of total iCloud storage, not just photo storage. That means your photos share that space with your iPhone backups and other app backups. There is a final 1 TB tier for $20 a month. I haven't reached that tier yet, but I think I will need it in a few months.
But that still doesn't solve my problem. Or problems.
iCloud does not offer an efficient way to search my photos other than search by date, location and unreliably, by faces. I cannot, for instance, do a search like 'show me all the photos of food in the last 2 months in Los Angeles'. Google Photos actually can do that. Or so they say.
How do I carry my entire 100K+ photo library on my iPhone ? That doesn't make sense though. About 80% of my photos are multiples or one time use photos. I would like someone or some algorithm to analyze each and every photo, classify it, tag it and only then store a subset of the most important, relevant and best quality photos on my iPhone.
Then there is the Family problem. Everyone in my family has their own iPhone. Thats four of us. They are taking photos all the time. They have their own iCloud account so they can backup their photos. But there is no way to have one common Family Photo Library that syncs with every iPhone automatically. You have to choose a photo manually and add it to the Family album, after you have turned on iCloud Family Sharing. Those photos then sync across all the iPhones that are registered in Family Sharing. Provided you have sacrificed an animal to the iCloud gods.
This is too much work. Yeah, I know, first world problems again. Don't judge. If you are reading this then you live in the first world too.
So here is my ideal photo solution for iCloud:
The key here is unifying photo libraries across users and the natural language image search. Google Photos offers the latter, but I have not seen any documentation or review where it offers to unify photo libraries across multiple accounts.
I am sure that the Product Managers for Photos & iCloud at Apple have similar photo management problems. I don't know how they are getting by. Who do they complain to ? Are they all young single people who don't have to worry about kids with trigger happy iPhone cameras generating a photo every few minutes? Or maybe they are aware of this problem and realize its a crazy tough problem to crack and they aren't getting paid enough to solve it.
In either case, get on with it Apple. I pay you far too much money already. Take some more and solve the photo problem. Or somebody is gonna get hurt real bad...
Apple, in preparation for WWDC 2015, put up this new support document on configuring HomeKit accessories with your iOS device. When Apple launched HomeKit last year at WWDC 2014, there was a puzzling UX discrepancy: Apple had not defined how the HomeKit accessories could be controlled remotely.
The blogosphere and the pundits guessed and apparently guessed right. The support document states that an Apple TV is now required if users want to control their HomeKit accessories remotely using Siri.
If you have an Apple TV (3rd generation or later) with software version 7.0 or later, you can control your HomeKit-enabled accessories when you're away from home using your iOS device. Sign in with the same Apple ID on your iOS device and Apple TV, and you'll be able to use Siri commands to remotely control your accessories.
I had purchased the original Apple TV when it launched in 2007. Anyone remember those ? It looked like a Mac Mini and even came with a built-in hard drive. But it was too slow and unwieldy and there was not enough content to watch. I jailbroke it and installed Plex. But even that was buggy. I soon abandoned it.
When the next generation hockey puck Apple TV launched, I checked it out but realized it wasn't suited for my viewing needs. I did not purchase/rent any movies or TV shows on iTunes and Apple had not added the various streaming channels that are now available (including HBO) upon launch. I preferred the Roku, then the Xbox 360 for Netflix & Amazon Video. I have a Mac Mini hooked up to the TV running Plex as my local content viewer.
But now I may have to finally give in and get an Apple TV as it now becomes the HomeKit 'hub'. This is a shrewd strategy of repurposing the existing base of millions of installed Apple TVs and leapfrogging over all other hub solutions that control IOT (Internet of Things) devices.
I predict that a year from now, the Apple TV HomeKit Hub will be far more successful than other proprietary IOT hub solutions out there.
Hey Siri, turn off those study lights, will ya ?
Tim Cook made a fanastic stand on user privacy and encryption in a speech to EPIC's Champions of Freedom gathering in Washington DC on June 1, 2015.
Matthew Panzarino has a breakdown of the speech and some hard commentary at TechCrunch:
Cook then laid out an Abraham Lincoln quote (which I vetted, it’s true): “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. We shouldn’t ask our customers to make a tradeoff between privacy and security. We need to offer them the best of both,” Cook wrapped up. “Ultimately, protecting someone else’s data protects all of us.”
Emphasis is mine. That is the boldest stance yet that Tim Cook has taken and a direct attack on Google, especially in the light of recent Google I/O announcements.
So if you don't know what you are buying or if you are getting something for free, then YOU are the product. I hope people will realize this soon enough. Its not that I am a blind Apple follower, but I know for sure that Apple won't sell my data or spy on my content.
After all, there is something to be said about Apple's mantra being 'Building the best product for our users' and Google's refrain of 'Don't be evil'.
Whom would you trust ?
Great article by Craig Timberg at the Washington Post on the Border Gateway Protocol:
“By the time a pair of engineers sat down for lunch together in Austin, the Internet’s growing pains had become dire. Once a novelty for computer scientists, the network was now exploding in size, lurching ever closer to a hard mathematical wall built into one of the Internet’s most basic protocols.
As the prospect of system meltdown loomed, the men began scribbling ideas for a solution onto the back of a ketchup-stained napkin. Then a second. Then a third. The “three-napkins protocol,” as its inventors jokingly dubbed it, would soon revolutionize the Internet. And though there were lingering issues, the engineers saw their creation as a “hack” or “kludge,” slang for a short-term fix to be replaced as soon as a better alternative arrived.
That was 1989.”
I was soon to encounter BGP in 1991, my third year of studying Computer Engineering. This turned out to be important in 1997 when my brother and I launched India's first private ISP - WMINet - and we worked with VSNL, the state-owned ISP, educating them about BGP.
Those were early wild west days of the Internet in India and built on personal relationships with admins at each ISP. So personal, that I had root access on giaspn01 - the first commercial public email server in India operated by VSNL. That story for another day.
But within a couple of years the Internet exploded in India and that, was the end of the innocence.
It has been exactly a month since I got the Apple Watch. Well, Watches. I ordered 3 of them, one for personal use and two for testing at work. I like my day job.
I ordered the personal one first, a 42 mm Steel with black leather loop. Since the steel watch is just called the 'Apple Watch' by Apple, it gets hard to refer to it specifically. I think we have all settled in calling it the Steel Watch. The lineup is now the Sport, Steel and the Gold and that's that.
As soon as I placed my order for the Steel, I saw the shipping date was not the launch date of April 24, but May 13. Damn. I didn't pay attention to details. So I went back to the Apple Store app and ordered the 42 mm Sport with the white fluoroelastomer band. And I added a 38 mm Sport with the blue band for good measure. Shipping date April 24. Bingo.
The Sport watches arrived late afternoon on April 24. By then, Twitter was alive with unboxing and setup screenshots. iMore was getting crazy with Watch tips, how-to's and videos at the rate of 2 per minute. Gruber was analyzing his Watch review for the Nth time and agonizing over the right time to post it. Dalrymple was trying to find a band that matched his beard. Snell started planning a 2 year series of day long Watch podcasts. And Ihnatko sat polishing his Moto 360.
Since then, you have probably read a few thousand articles on every aspect of the Watch. The Setup process, the fumbling with the Digital Crown and Contacts button, getting lost in the app vs clock face/glances navigation and the joy of the Rings of Activity - all have been dissected, criticized and mastered.
My experience was similar. The joy of the cool setup was short-lived as it failed the first time. Probably due to a timeout issue. On a Watch. Bada Bing. I guess I was too slow in progressing through each step as I was busy admiring the fit and finish of the Watch. It took me a second try and I was up and running with my 42 mm Sports Watch with the white fluoroelastomer band.
Fast forward a month and here is the long summary of my experience:
So that in a nutshell (assuming its a fairly large nut), is the long and short of it.
The Watch definitely has a use for notifications, checking time & appointments, ordering Uber (that was pretty cool) and sending messages. Those activities meant that I took out my iPhone 6+ less often and was able to stay focused on tasks at hand without going down a Twitter rat-hole.
I can't wait for truly native Watch centric apps that will appear in the next six months.
Until then, keep calm and watch on...