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More evidence of the ways technology can be bad for our health

Stories about how technology can be bad for our health is not new, of course. But two articles in this particular genre caught my attention this week. The first is some HBR research showing that Having Your Smartphone Nearby Takes a Toll on Your Thinking (Even When It’s Silent and Facedown):

The mere presence of our smartphones is like the sound of our names or a crying baby — something that automatically exerts a gravitational pull on our attention. Resisting that pull takes a cognitive toll.

A bit more about that “gravitational pull”:

Research in cognitive psychology shows that humans learn to automatically pay attention to things that are habitually relevant to them, even when they are focused on a different task. For example, even if we are actively engaged in a conversation, we will turn our heads when someone says our name across the room. Similarly, parents automatically attend to the sight or sound of a baby’s cry.


In another article, Virginia Heffernan explores the question What Are Screens Doing to Our Eyes—And Our Ability to See?:

Having recently, in my forties, gotten reading glasses, I now find myself having to choose between reading and being, since I can’t read without them and I can’t see the world with them. The glasses date from a time when reading was much rarer a pastime than being; you’d grope for them to see a book, while relying on your naked eyes for driving, talking, walking.

There is no “solution” to this, but as someone who also has reading glasses, I do like her approach to make this weird feeling a little better:

When I pull away from the screen to stare into the middle distance for a spell, I take off my glasses. I try to find a tree. If I’m inside, I open a window; if I’m outside, I will even approach a tree. I don’t want mediation or glass. The trees are still strangers; I hardly know their names yet, but I’m testing myself on leaf shapes and shades of green. All I know so far is that trees are very unlike screens. They’re a prodigious interface. Very buggy. When my eyes settle after a minute or two, I—what’s that expression, “the scales fell from my eyes”? It’s almost, at times, like that.

Easier blog post image management with Dropshare and Amazon S3

I’m always on the lookout for faster ways to upload and insert images into blog posts. It’s the part of the blogging workflow that I dislike the most. Up to now I’ve used a pretty convoluted combination of Amazon S3 buckets and Transmit. But over the weekend, while moving hosting providers1, I finally came up with a really simple image upload workflow that I thought I’d share in case it helps anyone else.

This workflow lets you drag and drop an image to a menu bar icon on your Mac, and then immediately paste a secure, custom domain URL for that image wherever you need it.


Step 1 – Create S3 bucket

Create an Amazon S3 bucket for your image uploads. It doesn’t matter what you name the bucket, but do not add a . to the name. This creates some weird SSL certificate errors later in the process that you don’t want to deal with.

Also make sure you set the bucket to be publicly accessible via the Permissions tab, otherwise you’ll get read errors for your files.

Step 2 – Create CloudFront distribution

Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution for the S3 bucket you just created, so that you can use a custom URL for your images, and make use of Amazon’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) capabilities.

When you go through the flow of adding a distribution for your S3 bucket, leave the “Distribution Settings” section blank at first — we’ll come back to that.

CloudFront settings

Step 3 – Add custom domain for your images

Back on the main Distributions screen, note the CloudFront domain name that was created for your bucket. It’s going to be in the format ***************.cloudfront.net. Go to your DNS provider and add a CNAME for the custom domain you want to use for your images.

In my case, cdn.elezea.com points to my CloudFront distribution at d26fqxuc6*****.cloudfront.net, which in turn links to the S3 bucket I set up earlier.

Step 4 – Add SSL certificate to CloudFront distribution

Now go back to your Distribution Settings in CloudFront. Add your CNAME information, and then click the button to “Request or Import a Certificate with ACM”.

This will take you through the process of generating a free SSL cert to be used with your CloudFront distribution. This is essential if you serve your site over https. If you don’t do this, your images will be served over http and you will get “mixed content” warnings when you embed images in your site.

Change your settings to “Custom SSL Certificate”, and you’re good to go.

CloudFront settings

Interlude – take a breath

If you’ve successfully completed these steps, here’s where you’ll be. Whenever you upload an image to your S3 bucket, you will be able to serve that image via your custom URL over https, and as an added bonus, you’ll be using Amazon’s CDN for super fast delivery.

Now we need to figure out the fastest way to get images into that bucket of yours.


Step 5 – Download and set up Dropshare

There are many sophisticated ways to manage your S3 buckets. But when it comes to uploading an image and getting a URL for it, I haven’t found anything that’s simpler than Dropshare.

In short, Dropshare allows you to establish connections to all your S3 buckets. It lets you upload files by dragging them to the Dropshare menu bar icon, and then the URL for that image is automatically copied to your clipboard. So to add an image to this blog post, for example, I just drag the image to the menu bar icon, then come back to where I’m writing and ⌘-V to insert the link. It couldn’t be easier.

I have a bunch of S3 buckets linked up in Dropshare:

Dropshare

In the case of the bucket I use for this site, note that I entered the bucket name, the domain alias (the CNAME you added earlier), and that I have the “Use SSL” box checked:

Drophsare

This makes the workflow for adding images an absolute breeze. Drag and paste. That’s it.

When you upload an image, Dropshare lets you choose the bucket you want to upload to, as well as if you want to add a landing page and/or use a URL shortener (which I usually don’t, but it’s nice to have the option).

Drophsare

Dropshare is useful for other things too. I have a keyboard shortcut that takes a screen shot, automatically uploads it to an S3 bucket, and copies the URL to the clipboard. That’s great for sharing screen shots in Slack, for example.


I’m not sure how many people have this need to shave a few minutes off their image workflow. But I hope this post is useful for the few of you who do obsess about things like this, like I do. And please let me know if you think this flow can be improved even more!


  1. I’m now with DreamHost and much happier. 

Product management for maturing products

Janna Bastow wrote a great post on product management for maturing products. From Growing up Lean: Lean Strategies for Maturing Products, here’s a recommendation for how to avoid becoming a “Feature Factory”:

Break the backlog up into two parts: The Product Backlog and the Development Backlog. […]

Product Backlog: A list of all of the things you could do. You’ll never complete everything on this list, and it’ll always be in a constant state of flux. It’ll include customer requests, suggestions from your team, through to insights from your experiments and prototypes. It should be accessible by your team, to both contribute and follow along on progress – your team should be helping to build and flesh out the ideas in your backlog. This is your space to prototype and spec out ideas, map them to your objectives, and track their progress until ready for production.

This is similar to how we do things at Postmark. Here is our Releases board in JIRA:

JIRA releases board

You’ll see that we have our short-term planning (the Development Backlog), that currently only covers 2018.2 and 2018.3 (roughly 6 weeks each). And then we have the mysterious Later release… that’s the Product Backlog. It’s that list of all the things we could do. When we do short-term planning we pull from that list, as well as other areas (most notably, our “Idea Zone” in Basecamp, which I should also write about at some point).


I’ve written about maturing products before as well. I’m happy to see that Jenna and I bring up similar points. Here’s a quote from my post Product Management for well-established products, which echoes some of her thoughts:

With an established product, it’s way too easy to get off track (Evernote, anyone…?). So what I argue for is a flexible quarterly roadmap of prioritized themes. You don’t write down dates next to a long list of features. You don’t make hard commitments for releases that might never happen.

Instead, you put together a list of themes you’d like to work on, in order of priority, based on how closely they align with your objectives and key results for the quarter.

Craig Mod on the revival of print and why it’s important to go offline

Oh boy, where to begin with Craig Mod’s interview with Offscreen Magazine. I’ve been following Craig’s work for a long time, so I have an undeniable bias towards everything he does. But some of the things he says in this interview touched a deep nerve for me, as it relates to a lot of what I’ve been thinking about lately.

It’s a long interview, and you should absolutely take the time to read it all. I’ll just post a couple of my favorite quotes here.


On the revival of print and other analog technologies:

I think books are the perfect disconnected objects. They require no energy. They offer a fully immersive, quiet experience for hours or days. The medium dissolves but never becomes translucent. It’s quiet, but present. An exceptional technology.

When you sit down with a book, you understand the parameters of engagement. You know how long the book is. The book isn’t changing as you read it. It’s a solid, immutable thing. You and the book are on equal terms in many ways, as least from a physics point of view. You know what’s going to happen, and the book abides by its implicit contract, which is to be a book.

However, in digital-land many spaces (apps, games) quickly turn into slithering creatures beneath your feet. You never know where you stand. Their worlds are optimized to pull you back in for one more minute, one more click. Over and over. Cascades of chemical reactions in your noggin’ tell you to keep going, just one more hit; I feel this persona of the addict very strongly when I am online or using certain apps or devices.


On your life’s work and what moves you:

Does affecting one hundred lives turn you on? A thousand? A million? A billion? Why? What does it mean to have a positive impact on a life? How intimate does that connection need to be? Understanding your scale — the scale that moves you — is critical to understanding with whom and how you should work, how you should live.


On always being online:

The default expectation today is “always available.” The systems we created are so frictionless that we haven’t noticed how insidiously over-engaged we are. Step by step we’re optimizing ourselves to “maximum” productivity without defining or thinking about “productivity” on a human scale. The digital world abstracts. One could argue most problems contemporary society faces are problems of over-abstraction. As an employer with a global workforce, you have no idea where your employees might be or what they might be doing, so you expect them to answer immediately. The concept of downtime is elusive.


And finally, on “edges”, a topic he’s written about a lot:

Edges ground us. Without clear edges we don’t feel like we’re in control.

Craig Mod - Offscreen Magazine Interview

Social media and ambient humanity

I can’t get this quote from Dan Cohen’s Back to the Blog out of my head:

It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase that feeling of ambient humanity and thus increase your usage of their service.

For anyone who doesn’t get why features like Instagram Stories are so popular, there you go. “Ambient humanity” is a very strong force. We share seemingly insignificant details about our lives not because we think everything we do is important or worth sharing. We do it to know we’re not alone.

(link via Kottke.org)

The weird future of facial recognition

This story by Rene Chun about China’s New Frontiers in Dystopian Tech is wild:

Don’t even think about jaywalking in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province. Last year, traffic-management authorities there started using facial recognition to crack down. When a camera mounted above one of 50 of the city’s busiest intersections detects a jaywalker, it snaps several photos and records a video of the violation. The photos appear on an overhead screen so the offender can see that he or she has been busted, then are cross-checked with the images in a regional police database. Within 20 minutes, snippets of the perp’s ID number and home address are displayed on the crosswalk screen. The offender can choose among three options: a 20-yuan fine (about $3), a half-hour course in traffic rules, or 20 minutes spent assisting police in controlling traffic. Police have also been known to post names and photos of jaywalkers on social media.

I can’t help but be reminded of that “biometric advertising” scene in Minority Report:

Minority Report

Facebook is not honoring its side of the data deal with users

I think everyone has “Facebook Article Exhaustion” right now. But Brian Barrett’s Facebook Owes You More Than This makes a somber, important point:

This is not a screed about deleting your Facebook account. It’s not a rant about online ads. It is an argument, though, that Facebook has been a poor steward of your data, asking more and more of you without giving you more in return—and often not even bothering to ask. It has repeatedly failed to keep up its side of the deal, and expressed precious little interest in making good.

If you feel exasperated by the whole Facebook privacy debacle, I think this article will help make sense of some of those feelings. One more quote:

But as Facebook collects more and more data, and offers advertisers more and more tools to monetize it, the benefit to you seems not to have grown in kind. You get an ever-shifting algorithm designed to keep you scrolling, which the company’s own research suggests can leave you “feeling worse afterward.” You get dozens of Russian propagandists flooding millions of News Feeds with high-emotion content designed to undermine US democracy, with slow and incomplete disclosures about the impact. And you get ads for the same pair of shoes—that you already bought—trailing you for months.


Also check out the always excellent Paul Ford’s Facebook Is Why We Need a Digital Protection Agency, in which he calls for a digital equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency. His reasoning:

The activist and internet entrepreneur Maciej Ceglowski once described big data as “a bunch of radioactive, toxic sludge that we don’t know how to handle.” Maybe we should think about Google and Facebook as the new polluters. Their imperative is to grow! They create jobs! They pay taxes, sort of! In the meantime, they’re dumping trillions of units of toxic brain poison into our public-thinking reservoir. Then they mop it up with Wikipedia or send out a message that reads, “We take your privacy seriously.”

Spotify and the business of making hits

Spotify has been in the news quite a bit recently, especially since their IPO announcement. The best article I’ve read so far about Spotify’s business model (and challenges) is Ben Thompson’s Lessons from Spotify:

Spotify’s margins are completely at the mercy of the record labels, and even after the [lower royalties] rate change, the company is not just unprofitable, its losses are growing, at least in absolute euro terms.

Ben goes further to explain how difficult it would be for Spotify to cut out record labels completely:

Notice how little power Spotify and Apple Music have; neither has a sufficient user base to attract suppliers (artists) based on pure economics, in part because they don’t have access to back catalogs. Unlike newspapers, music labels built an integration that transcends distribution.


Profitability aside, it’s fascinating and kind of scary to get a sense of the oversized role that Spotify plays in deciding what becomes a hit song. Austin Powell digs into the details in his article Inside the booming black market for Spotify playlists:

The biggest of those playlists can essentially manufacture hits. A single add to Spotify’s influential RapCaviar, which boasts more than 8 million followers, can result in hundreds of thousands of streams, depending on where it’s placed and how long it stays there. RapCaviar has been credited, for example, with making Smokepurpp’s “Audi” go gold, with 68 million streams and counting.


But wait, there’s more (as the say). Some of Spotify’s biggest playlists are owned by none other than the record labels themselves. From Liz Pelly’s The Secret Lives of Playlists:

On other playlists, you’ll occasionally notice different logos: the thick cursive word Filtr, the all-caps logo for Topsify, or simple rounded text reading Digster. These are the playlisting brands owned by the major labels: Filtr by Sony, Topsify by Warner, and Digster by Universal.

What does this mean?

Outside of the Spotify staff-curated playlists, those curated by Filtr, Digster and Topsify have more visibility on the Browse pages than any other playlisting brands, individuals or labels. With these playlists, employees of Filtr, Digster and Topsify can simply log in and add tracks.

“Things like Topsify, Digster and Filtr remain good resources, especially for [major label] developing artists,” says Jeff. “I know that I can plug in such-and-such track to five [of our] playlists and start to rack up some plays, some revenue for that artist, get it in front of some new listeners, and you also get some algorithmic stuff going. Like Release Radar and Discover Weekly.” By using Filtr, Topsify and Digster playlists to generate activity on their own material, the majors effectively use these playlists to pump their artists into Spotify-owned algorithmic playlists.

The musical world belongs to the “curators” and algorithms. We’re just listening in it. And the company that has the most control over it all is not even close to being profitable.

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