Nag nag nag nag nag

The smart watch is a pretty cool thing to have around. Except it’s like the biggest nag on the planet. This probably says more about me than it does the technology though.

  1. The default proposed “activity” goal of 10,000 points per day is just not happening. I’m thinking that if this was a smart ring and sat on one of my typing fingers I’d have this knocked out before lunch. But it sits on my wrist and so my watch thinks I’m a fat, lazy bastard. Which I am. So there is that.
  2. Alerts! For the who-knows-how-many-timeth today it has let me know that the Maple Leafs and Islanders play tonight. [Hush, the Islanders are my dirty secret–don’t tell the Canucks.] It’s just picking up what’s on Google Now from my phone and regurgitating that back to me. I could fix that by swiping that card but I like having that card there. Intermittently during the games I can check my phone and get scores in one place. So I don’t want to swipe that yet. Besides, if I swipe that it’ll just tell me that Vancouver is playing Dallas tonight…which is a game I’m more interested in any way. I could swipe that one too but then there’s whatever else Google Now thinks I need to know now. But, still, I don’t need to know this every [sync period that seems to be about 20 minutes]. So, watch, do a little tracking of state and run that alert like a marquee at least. Can we try that?

But the rest of it? Great fun. Sometimes I purposely lose my phone just so I can hit the “Find Phone” button and then do just that. Calling and texting people Dick Tracy style is pretty fun. Managing Spotify from my wrist is fun. I always know the time (weird, huh?) but also the current weather and temperature. And wearing a watch is a cool thing that I think I forgot about when my last watch battery died and I just ditched it for the phone instead of replacing the battery.

So that’s my review of the Toq after having lived with it for a few weeks. Thanks again, baby! You treat me too well.

OMNI Reboot

Remember OMNI magazine? The one with the vvvveerrrryyyy late 70’s computer age affectation font used in its logo:

omni-logo

I think I mostly encountered this magazine in the dusty corners of some of the more nebbish teachers’ classrooms in junior high (that’s middle school to you whippersnappers). I didn’t read it much then. I don’t even know why because it seems to have been exactly square in the middle of what would pique my interest. Perhaps it was too sciency and not enough fantasy for my liking. At any rate, it was reportedly one heck of a rag in its day. I think it was mothballed in the late 1990’s but can’t be arsed to Wikipedia up an answer.

Side note: can we use wikipedia as verb in the same way we use google? Because I tend to want to.

Right. So. The point of all of this is that about a month ago there was a “reboot” of OMNI as a web publication. You can read it here[1]. And, folks, let me tell you. It is freaking awesome! I’ve been loving it. It sits in my RSS reader and sends me goodness about once a day. In the event you were a fan of OMNI back in the day and/or enjoy the intersection of science, technology, culture, design, and fiction then I highly recommend you check it out.

[1] http://omnireboot.com/

The right password always helps

So I spent a lot of time with the iPhone WordPress app trying to connect it with this blog and was never successful. Turns out that I’d never “modernized” the password for this account so was using one I used to use when I first went back to WordPress seven years ago. Never bothered to check that when trying to set up the iPhone version of this app.

Feeling pretty dumb.

Sarah Palin Yahoo account hacked

Sarah Palin Yahoo account 2008 – Wikileaks

Come for the lulz, stay for the uncomfortable feeling that perhaps hacking email because you are able to might possibly be worse than using private email accounts for government business. Seriously, though, it takes some kind of stupid to use an email service like Yahoo!/MSN/Gmail for anything other than one-off membership signups. It takes some seriously kind of stupid to conduct government business [allegedly] on one of these account. Sure, the thought of end-running open document and transparency laws has some allure for the politician with something to hide, but security through obscurity never ever pays in the end.

Caveat: It has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Sarah Palin has used private email for public business, but there are some pretty damning allegations that she has. Further, from what I saw, nothing in the b/tards’ dump approaches any kind of smoking gun. Then again, I glanced at this while at work.