"You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered.

That struck me as a bizarre sentiment. What is there to be left behind from? If BitCoin (or whatever) is going to liberate us all from economic drudgery, what's the point of "getting in early"? It'll still be there tomorrow and I can join the journey whenever it is sensible for me.

Part of the crypto grift was telling people to "Have Fun Staying Poor". That weaponisation of FOMO was an insidious way to get people to drop their scepticism.

I feel the same way about the current crop of AI tools. I've tried a bunch of them. Some are good. Most are a bit shit. Few are useful to me as they are now. I'm utterly content to wait until their hype has been realised. Why should I invest in learning the equivalent of WordStar for DOS when Google Docs is coming any-day-now?

If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours.

I didn't use Git when it first came out. Once it was stable and jobs began demanding it, I picked it up. Might I be 7% more effective if I'd suffered through the early years? Maybe. But so what? I could just as easily have wasted my time learning something which never took off.

I wrote my MSc on The Metaverse. Learning to built VR stuff was fun, but a complete waste of time. There was precisely zero utility in having gotten in early.

Perhaps there are some things for which it is sensible to be on the cutting edge. I took part in a vaccine trial because I thought it might personally benefit me and, hopefully, humanity.

But I'm struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first. Some early investors made money - but an equal and opposite number lost money. For every HTML 2.0 you might have tried, you were just as likely to have got stuck in the dead-end of Flash.

There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Are you genuinely saying that they'll all be left behind because they didn't learn your technology in utero?

No. That's obviously nonsense.

It is 100% OK to wait and see if something is actually useful.

The problem is, the same dudes (and it was nearly always dudes) who were pumped for all of that bollocks now won't stop wanging on about Artificial Fucking Intelligence.

"It's gonna be the future bro, just trust me!"

"I dunno, man. Seems like you say that about every passing fancy - and they all end up being utterly underwhelming."

"This time is different!"

*sigh*

The investor who says, “This time is different,” when in fact it’s virtually a repeat of an earlier situation, has uttered among the four most costly words in the annals of investing.

16 rules for investment success - Sir John Templeton

All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists. I don't doubt that AI will be a part of the future - but it is obviously just going to be one of many technology which are in use.

No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.

Terry Pratchet's Faust Eric

The ideology of "winner takes all" is unsustainable and not supported by reality.

It is refreshing to read a political polemic which contains useful actions the reader can take. Too many books about the social problems with technology end up being a diagnosis with no cure.

Paloma Oliveira's new book (with technical review by my friend Dawn Foster) is a deep dive into how we can all make Open Source more inclusive and equitable.

Unlike most tech books, it doesn't follow the usual pattern of restricting itself to the US hegemony. It is very focussed on the EU and the needs of people around the world. It is clear in identifying many of the problems which arise when people say they just want to focus on tech, not politics:

When projects focus purely on technical excellence without considering accessibility, they create implicit barriers. Documentation written only in English, community discussions held during North American business hours, or development environments that require high-end hardware all reflect choices that determine who can participate—though these choices often remain unexamined.

This is profoundly important. The book isn't afraid to be challenging. It links the way companies extract value from the commons to the way colonisers extracted value from the lands they "discovered".

There are a few missteps which I didn't care for. While it starts as very casually written, it quickly finds itself getting into the weeds of political philosophy. I think that's a necessary evil. But I don't know how easily people will be convinced by passages like:

Bratton notes secessionist withdrawal in traditional territories and consolidation domains in stacked hemispheric, the continuing expansions of nebular sovereignties, and the reform of conventional States into regional platforms.

Similarly, there are a few "just-so" stories which are fictional parables. I think they would have been more convincing as actual case-studies.

I did find myself skipping some of the background in order to get to the parts I found more interesting. The chapter on "Political Rhetoric and Institution Validation" felt a bit out of place and I didn't get much from it.

But, after all that theory, there is a lot of practical advice. From how to structure your README to how to communicate change to your community. Even better, all the templates and resources are on GitHub.

It is thoroughly referenced and gave me lots of new rabbit-holes to follow Rather pleasingly, it cites my 2020 blog post "Please Stop Inventing New Software Licences" as an example of the ways in which corporates often try to stifle open source.

If you want to help Open Source succeed, you owe it to yourself to grab a copy of this book.

By contrast, a single computer terminal was likely to set you back around £3,000 - and that's before you take into account message transmission costs. That's roughly the same price as sending over 8,000 letters. Is that a sensible investment for the 1980's businessman?

In 1986, British Telecom started producing "The Communications Programme" which was "a new video magazine produced exclusively for the top communications people in the UK's largest organisations".

The show was distributed on video-tape and the archived shows are genuinely fascinating. They're a mixture of business reporting, thinly veiled advertorials, and a glance at the future of digital services.

Buried in the middle of episode 4 is this advert from the Department of Trade and Industry.

There's very little online information about the "Vanguard Project" - it was a VADS initiative (Value Added Data Services) run by DTI, BT, IBM, INS, ISTEL, and FASTRAK. Some of those acronyms survive, some don't!

Its aim was to promote awareness of EDI and its potential for the United Kingdom.

In 1986 the Department of Trade and Industry launched a project called Vanguard to promote the development of this kind of service in 10 different sectors including construction, educational supplies and wholesale food distribution. The major VADS suppliers (BT, IBM, INS, Istel and the Midland Bank) in the UK were heavily involved in the project from the beginning.

Information Sources in Information Technology

What's "EDI"?

Electronic Data Interchange.

A means of transferring data between co-operating enterprises without having to print it out on one computer and key it into another. Requires agreement about standards (proprietary or otherwise).

Did it work? Well, that's hard to say!

There's a paper from 1989 called Survey of Electronic Data Interchange Users and Service Providers in the UK. It dives into the then current challenges of getting British businesses to adopt EDI.

It quotes Sir John Harvey-Jones saying that most people running companies were:

…old people like me not familiar with the technological possibilities! We have great difficulty in making imaginative jumps to see the way in which the whole of our business can be reorganised, revitalised, set up in totally new ways, releasing energy and cost and putting us into the pole position. I can see abundant evidence that the full benefits of EDI will only be reaped by the companies where the Chief Executives is seized with enthusiasm for the potential prize he can grasp.

Which still seems true today! Although over-enthusiasm has led us to a weird AI-in-everything future.

The paper doesn't talk about Vanguard specifically, although it does have this rather cute diagram adapted from one of its reports:

Not quite the Gartner Hype Cycle!

The paper concludes that:

Unfortunately the zealots of EDI tend to be unable to ‘sell’ the benefits to management in most companies, and this is not helped by the way that many companies have been forced to trade electronically. Management tends to think that EDI is about computers, and because they think that computers are technical they abdicate responsibility with the cry of ‘its all too difficult’. This must be wrong. It is up to those who understand EDI to learn how to talk to management, and it is up to management to understand that not only is EDI not about technology, but even if it was it is still their responsibility.

Again, true as it ever was!

Nestled in the bibliography is this tantalising list of publications from the now-defunct Her Majesty's Stationery Office:

None of which appear to be online, although a few are in The British Library - and a few more available on Google Books

The state awarded several contracts for Vanguard - most of which seemed to be in the training space. Here's what The EDI handbook said about it:

(My thanks to Don Thompson, Owen Boswarva, and Ms7821 for digging out some of those references.)

Did it work? By the time I entered the workforce in the 1990s, it seemed like every desk had a computer. Although the Internet was in its infancy, email and electronic ordering was a normal part of business. The various proto-Internet protocols were still around, but were quickly being replaced.

A thesis published in 1991 asked an important question:

why should a non-interventionist Government as Thatchers become directly involved in developing the market and working together with private companies whose normal aim is to increase market share at the expense of their competitors rather, than cooperate with them?

The impact of Electronic data interchange on Irish foreign trade and transport

Metcalfe's Law tells us that there is no value being the only business on a network. It simply isn't rational to invest in connecting to a data service that no-one else is on. But the value of that network increases as more people and businesses get connected. If you've read The Entrepreneurial State, you'll know that governments are often responsible for subsidising technological initiatives like this. The state, its citizenry, and its businesses all benefit from the increased efficiencies of electronic communications, so it is only right that the state should bootstrap these sorts of projects.

I sent an FoI request to find out more but it looks like all the information is now archived.

If you know of any other sources of information about Project Vanguard - please leave a comment.

It is a modern and feminist take on Seeing Like A State - and acknowledges that book as a major influence. What are the dangers of static standards which force people into uncomfortable boxes? How can data be misused and turns against us?

Rather wonderfully (for this type of book) it isn't all doom and gloom! It acknowledges that (flawed as racial categorisation may be) the state's obsession with demographic data can lead to useful revelations:

in the United Kingdom, the rate of death involving COVID-19 has been highest for Bangladeshi people than any other ethnic group, while all ethnic minority groups face higher risks than white British people.

This isn't to say that data shouldn't be collected, or that it can only be used in benevolent ways, but that without data all we have is guesswork.

We undeniably live in a stratified society which is often (wilfully) ignorant of the rights and desires of migrants. Displaced people are often forced to give up their data in exchange for their survival. They are nominally given a choice but, as Rahman points out, it is hard to have high-minded ideals about data sovereignty when you're starving.

Interestingly, she interviewed people who collect the data:

In fact, some people responsible for implementing these systems told me that they would be very reluctant to give away biometric data in the same way that they were requesting from refugees and asylum seekers, because of the longer-term privacy implications.

I slightly disagree with her conclusions that biometrics are "fundamentally unfair and unjust". Yes, we should have enough resources for everyone but given that we don't, it it that unreasonable to find some way to distribute things evenly? I recognise my privilege in saying that, and often bristle when I have to give my fingerprints when crossing a border. But I find it hard to reconcile some of the dichotomies she describes around access and surveillance.

Thankfully, the book is more than just a consciousness-raising exercise and does contain some practical suggestions for how people can protect themselves against the continual onslaught against our digital privacy.

Amateur radio is one of those things I'm only vaguely aware of. It chugs along in the background unnoticed. It doesn't follow the fashion of today's industry, nor does it chase growth at all costs. It is an open standard, run by a decentralised group of people rather than a corporation, and it favours relentless practicality rather than KPIs.

I love technologies like this.

The recent stratospheric rise in popularity of the QR Code is a example of where these long-term technologies work well.

I've been banging on about QR codes for over a decade - while marketers sneered and tech companies tried to usurp, QR codes kept chugging away in the background. When the pandemic hit, and people needed a way to scan in to venues or present a vaccine certificate, QR codes were ready. They were an open standard, completely decentralised, relentlessly practical, and battle tested. They were rolled out in a variety of situations.

Every contender who has come at them with a proprietary barcode has failed. And because people have had a chance to get used to QR codes, they're not seen as weird any more.

They are boring magic. Decentralised and free.

The Fediverse is similar. It powers Mastodon and other social networks. At the moment, proprietary networks like Twitter are dying and new networks like BlueSky are in their ascendency. But BSky will eventually get bought out by cryptoloons, or will shit the bed in some other spectacular fashion.

The Fediverse will have been rumbling on the the background. Slowly gathering momentum. Waiting for an implosion or emergency.

There are various other technologies like this. Built in to the fabric of online society, quietly ploughing their own furrow, increasing resilience, despite being unfashionable.

What technologies do you think are waiting to be rediscovered in times of change?

Recently, I treated myself to an upgrade - a Pixel 8 Pro. The biggest, fastest, fattest, AI-stuffed Android phone yet. It's pretty good! The camera is excellent, the heat-sensor is crap⁰, the battery is gorgeous, the weight is annoying. Google's software was too needy, so I replaced it with GrapheneOS.

But, as much as I like the device, there are some hardware things which I think would improve it. No, I'm not talking about a headphone jack! I'm talking about useful things¹.

More precise input

The early Androids - and most BlackBerrys - had either a rollerball or touch pad just below the screen.

It made it so much easier to do precise selection. Yeah yeah, I know you can slide along the spacebar to move a cursor, but it just isn't the same.

I get that a rollerball gunks up pretty quickly - but a touchpad or optical joystick would be lovely. Perhaps it could go on the...

Rear finger-print sensor

The technology behind the in-screen fingerprint sensor is magical. It works brilliantly. But I rather liked my One Plus 5T's rear sensor. It didn't blast my face with light, and I found it more natural to use when picking up the phone.

But, even better, the rear sensor acted as an input! When I stroked down on it, the notification shade appeared. Stroking up dismissed it. I'd love to have a rear-input like that again. I'd like more inputs in general!

Physical Buttons

In the future, cars will be ditching touchscreens in favour of physical buttons. Perhaps Android will do the same?

This is the HTC Dream - the original Android. And it is perfection.

Wouldn't it be nice to have physical buttons for home and back, rather than trying to remember what swipe actions to take? OK, perhaps a modern phone doesn't need this many buttons - but there are still some things where switches are useful. For example...

Silence Slider

Both the iPhone and several Android devices have a dedicated "silence" switch.

It was so handy. There's a comfort about being able to reach into your pocket while sat and the theatre and know that your phone is on silent. No unlocking and fiddling with on-screen menus. One flick and you're good.

But, with most modern Android, you have to peer at the screen to know what's going on. I kinda miss...

Status LED for power and messages

Back in the day, every Android phone had a multi-colour LED. It would show red when your battery needed charging. It would pulse when being charged. It would flash green if you had an SMS. With a glance you knew what your phone was doing.

AMOLED hasn't really lived up to its promise. There's no single-pixel flashing away on screen to let me know if I have a message. Instead, I have to pick up my phone to get the entire screen to activate. What a waste of battery life!

NFC on the top.

My new phone has NFC right in the middle of the back of the phone. That's a bit awkward for placing on a tap-to-pay terminal on the bus. My previous phone had the NFC right at the top.

It is doubly annoying for me as I wear an NFC ring. And the damn thing keeps triggering my phone!

I realise this is an extremely niche problem!

Keyboard

The last Android phone I had with a keyboard was a complete disaster. Maybe I'm kidding myself that a full tactile QWERTY experience is necessary?

But look how pretty!

Infrared Camera

Remember how I said the thermal sensor was shite? I've reviewed a couple of Thermal cameras for Android.

They're expensive - but certainly useful. Both for finding hotspots in your home and for seeing who is sweaty. OK, it isn't the most compelling bit of hardware. But if you're going to put a sensor on a phone, at least make it useful!

3D Screens and Haptic Screens

Years ago, I tried an LG phone with a 3D screen. No glasses! It used the same sort of technology as the Nintendo 3DS.

OK, it wasn't the highest resolution and you had to sit at a precise angle. But it was interesting tech!

Similarly, I once played with the Senseg haptic screen. It used weird electrostatic tech to make the texture of the screen change. It is almost impossible to describe and, if I didn't have this video, I might believe I dreamed it.

There are phones with built in laser projectors which, while fun, aren't that compelling to me.

What else is missing?

What do you remember from the early Androids that you think is missing now? Which crazy innovations need to make a comeback? Which Shenzhen-special already has all these features?

The book is a complicated but fitting legacy. It absolutely showcases Nóva's ideas, ideals, and potential. Perhaps a little overwrought in places, and a little underpowered in others. It's clear that her heart was in the right place and she was making a huge impact in the world. The staccato paragraphs and bullet point entries only underline how much she had to say and how quickly she wanted to say it.

There are a lot of pithy statements buried in the pages:

For every exciting innovation, a legacy system must rot.

And some sections ought to be tattoo'd on the inside of our eyelids:

Remember: The tech industry expects competition because the tech industry is built on capitalism. There’s legally nothing wrong with playing the same game that the corporations are playing.

The book attempts to map cybersecurity hacking onto work/life hacking. For example, can you use social engineering tricks to find job openings?

You can start to probe for weaknesses by looking for a response. In career exploitation, this can be a response to a tweet, a LinkedIn message, or an email.

It's a clever way of looking at the world. Indeed, Nóva has an interesting perspective on the tech scene as a trans-woman:

In my opinion, masculine socialization directly leads to the ruthlessly competitive personality types that are rewarded within tech. This opinion is based on my experience as both a man and woman working in the tech industry.

I'm not sure I buy all of the pronouncements she makes though. The book does overlook that some of us working in tech are doing so for Governments, charities, and non-profits. Sure, we're all inside capitalism, but our employers aren't necessarily solely driven by a profit motive.

It's certainly a hell of a lot better than most "thought leader" / "industry insider" nonsense. It's a good way to open your eyes to some of the ways the system is stacked against people - and how you can fight back.

Kris leaves behind a huge legacy. It would have been brilliant to see how much further she could have gone.

I'll leave the last word to her:

I want to buy as much land as possible and give it back to society and to the people. I want to wake up in the morning and — even if for a single day — I want to feel free.

This is Marianne Bellotti's attempt to explain how we get there and - just maybe - how we stop legacy cruft from building up in the first place.

I found myself highlighting every other page. It's chock-full of wisdom and endlessly quotable. Perhaps a few of the tales verge on the "Just-So" story - but we all need little morality tales to remind us how we should behave.

Ultimately, of course, this isn't about computers:

Overall, interfaces and ideas spread through networks of people, not based on merit or success.

There are some harsh words for programmers and systems architects:

Engineers tend to overestimate the value of order and neatness. The only thing that really matters with a computer system is its effectiveness at performing its practical application.

And

The lesson to learn here is the systems that feel familiar to people always provide more value than the systems that have structural elegances but run contrary to expectations.

Ouch! Harsh but fair.

It is a relentlessly pragmatic book. The author outlines what works, what doesn't, and why things happen. Keeping up the moment of success is the only way to stop a team from collapsing in despair. And the only way to stop a system collapsing into dust.

Humans built these systems. It takes human will, passion, and ingenuity to re-build them. We may think that we want the replacement to be harder, better, stronger, faster. But what our users crave is stability and predictability. Never lose sight of that.

So, I was watching that absolute banger of a tune "When You're Gone" by Bryan Adams (featuring Mel C) - when I noticed this:

It appears to be a desktop videophone! The interlacing looked artificial to me - but I've noted before that people think degraded images are somehow more authentic.

But something was niggling me. Were there really videophones of that ilk when that song was released in 1998? Well, yes and no.

There's a long history of prototype video-telephony - and by the mid-1990s there were some consumer products available.

This sweet number would set you back $1,600 (About $3,500 today). Better hope you had at least one rich friend who also had one.

If you scour eBay, you can find videophones from that bygone era. They are few and far between because they were a commercial flop. Video compression technology was in its infancy and modem speeds were poor. Even if you paid for an ISDN line, the video quality was guaranteed to be crap.

But what about this specific phone? Well, here I must reveal the disappointing news that Bryan Adams is a big fat liar and his music videos are full of falsehoods and shouldn't be trusted for serious historical researchers.

Ahem.

That's not a videophone in the music video.

Thanks to the sleuthing of Taig McNab and Stuart Langridge we can see that the phone is the Uniden Axis H0100.

I found one on eBay - here's what it looks like after a few decades of use:

The logos at the top and bottom of the screen have been covered with black rectangles - which is what made me think there was a camera embedded in the unit.

Far from a full-colour screen, this video shows the screen is a pretty rubbish LCD affair. White background and a choice of blue or grey for text. Indeed, it was used as a glorified calendar with address-book capabilities. Judging by contemporary reports it could connect to CompuServe - but, as with early videophones the reviews were not ethusiastic. And no mention of video-calling.

So, there you have it. Music videos should only be used for entertainment purposes and nothing more serious.

A relatively unknown hardware company has just released one of the first "fitness trackers" which can measure a wearer's physiology. As well as counting steps, it now has the ability to measure heart-rate and a bunch of other things. They think that athletes and exercisers will be interested in knowing these vital statistics. But they're wondering if there's another market they've missed.

My employer's pitch is simple - livestream the cardiac rhythms of football players back to their coaches. If Ted Lasso can see that Jamie Tartt is faltering, substitute him.

In a sense, it is no different than the tech that's used in Formula 1 racing. Team engineers can see the motor's exact RPM, temperature, and wear. Every facet of the car's performance is analysed to extract marginal gains in performance. And, incidentally, to prevent catastrophe.

With advances in technology, it would be possible to measure a player's oxygen saturation, their alertness, and lactic acid build up. Having complete understanding of athletes' health would be a literal game-changer.

We could go even further. How about we give that data to the TV broadcasters? How does it enhance your experience of the game if you can see the beats-per-minute of the striker and goalkeeper in a penalty shootout?

Our pitch-deck had a slightly more professionally produced version of this graphic:

Would bookmakers like to know that the star player had exhausted themselves? Would stats nerds like to know who ran the furthest? Would players like to scream abuse at the lazy players?

In the end, the pitch failed on three counts:

1. Battery power just wasn't good enough to continually transmit real-time data across a football pitch. Not without making the device much bulkier and heavier.
2. Worries about eavesdropping. Unless the signals were extremely well encrypted (not likely given the primitive technology and power requirements) then the opposition team could gather valuable insights on their rivals.
3. Player privacy. Professional athletes are humans. They want (and deserve) privacy. Perhaps they have a minor heart condition that they don't want the world knowing about?

I genuinely don't know enough about sports or the psychology of fans to know if this would have been successful. All the customer research seemed to think that it would have been a big hit with gamblers. I daresay with all the other augmented reality stats which currently deface the screen it would have fitted right in.

But, to most people, it felt needlessly invasive. There's still a huge "ick factor" around seeing other people's medical information. Players, we were told, just wouldn't go for it.

As the technology matures, I can't help wondering how long it is before it becomes ubiquitous. Would we demand politicians display their galvanic skin response so we can tell if they're lying? Should all first dates mandate arousal detectors to ensure compatibility? Will your employer let you take a loo break only if you can prove that you're bursting?

Strange times ahead...

If you're working for, say, a TV company - then you know exactly how much an hour of TV programming costs on average. If you want to do something like build a website, it's quite natural for people to evaluate its budget in terms of how many hours of TV it costs.

That can be a useful metric. It allows people to benchmark the impact your non-core project is having against the investment. But, in my experience, it can also be toxic.

One of the challenges I faced when working with the NHS was that lots of people view the health service only in terms of Nurses. And any change that you propose will instantly be compared with a Nurse's salary.

It's disturbingly easy to say "We need a new payroll system? But that will cost the same as ONE THOUSAND NURSES!"

But, of course, without a proper payroll system you will have zero nurses. And - whisper it - one thousand nurses isn't a huge number in context of the total number of nurses in the UK.

Now, don't get me wrong; I love nurses. But the NHS is also doctors, porters, receptionists, cleaners, and many more people. It is also buildings, TV screens, MRI machines, door handles, and scalpels. The NHS is computer systems, hardware, software, cloud processing, and giant stores of data.

Should we have more nurses? Yes! Should they be paid better? Yes! Can we improve the NHS without capital investment in technology? No!

Technology should be a generator of efficiencies. I'm aware that's not always the case and that a mismanaged project can be worse than no project at all. But comparing every piece of technology to a nurse's salary is an emotional sleight of hand which prevents any progress.

This was a common complaint we heard back then: "Ugh! Why do phones have all these useless, overcomplicated, random functions? People only want their phones to do three thing - calls, texts, and..."

And...

And that's where the problem was. That third thing was different for everyone. For some it was a calendar, for others a calculator. Some couldn't live without Snake, and others could cope without a MIDI style ringtone.

I see the same today in technology. Take something like Markdown. People only want a text formatting syntax to do three things. Bold text, links, and...

• Bullets
• Headings
• Tables
• Footnotes

At which point, you've basically reinvented HTML but with worse different syntax.

Messaging apps suffer the same problems. People only want to send texts, images, and...

• Reaction gifs
• Group chats
• Typing indicators
• Payment requests

This isn't a plea to reduce features. But, rather, it is a plea to users to have empathy for people who aren't like them. If you don't see the utility in a feature, that's probably because the feature isn't for you!

He's the same guy who insists that "real men" watch football, and can't quite believe that you have no opinion on last night's cup final.

This sort of behaviour is sometimes terms "fragile masculinity". It isn't that masculinity itself is a weak and feeble proposition - but that some people feel that masculinity needs defending because it is a brittle and narrow concept.

Think of it like this. I like X. I am a Real Man. Therefore Real Men like X. Therefore masculinity depends on X. If there is a man who doesn't like X, either he is not a man, or masculinity doesn't require X. If masculinity doesn't require X, and I like X, that would imply I am not a real man.

It isn't logical, of course, but it is a powerful idea.

This isn't solely an issue with concepts of masculinity. Gatekeeping happens everywhere. A real Star Trek fan hates all that gay stuff in the new season. Oh, you like Shakespeare? Recite your top ten sonnets! You claim to be aligned with this political party, but your stance on metrification reveals you to be a dirty traitor! And on and on it goes.

The same thing, sadly, happens in computing. Real programmers know a language intimately and never need to look up the docs. Real technologists never admit their ignorance. Real developers can recite Knuth.

I don't get it. If you're a man, you're a man. There's no "real" about it. What you drink and how you drink it has no bearing on your masculinity and - even if it did - it would have no bearing on my masculinity.

Same with technology. If you've made a computer do something - anything - in a logical fashion, you're a programmer. Scratch? Programmer! CSS? Programmer? Conditional formatting in Excel? Programmer!

Asking for help? Damn straight you're a programmer.

We have to find a way to help these people caught up in the trap of Fragile Technologism to see that there is a better, more inclusive way forward.

Self Driving Cars are losing billions of dollars.

The Metaverse is losing billions of dollars.

Are we about to witness the biggest crash in technological progress?

I'm particularly fond of the Rule of Credibility which states:

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

How true is that! If you've worked on any project, you know how easy it is to get most of the way there. And how difficult it is to get all of the way there.

If you remember your classics, you'll be acquainted with one of Zeno's paradoxes - the Dichotomy. Briefly stated, in order to reach a goal, you have to first get halfway there. In order to get halfway there, you must first get a quarter of the way there. To get to a quarter, you need to get to an eighth. And so on ad infinitum. Thus, it is logically impossible to reach your destination.

I kinda feel like that with some of today's tech products.

It's relatively simple to get a microphone that understands 90% of what you say. But to get to the last 10% means making ever-smaller incremental improvements until, years later, it's still not really worth using.

We've had semi-autonomous vehicles for years. But they're still stuck in that last 90% trap. Manufacturers can keep throwing children in front of them to see if the cars know to brake - but the reliability is still suspect.

VR has been going since the 1960s. Meta have successfully strapped an Android phone to a pair of lenses and called it the Metaverse. That's 90% of the way there!

There's an old joke about Zeno's paradox:

A university organised a dance for its students. All the men were to line up on one wall of a dance hall, and an equal number of women were to line up on the opposite wall⁰. The men were told to walk towards the women at a pace of a half the distance separating them every minute.

The mathematicians started weeping - saying that they would never get to meet.

The physicists looked glum - knowing they would only get to meet when time equals infinity.

The engineering students broke into a smile - because within a few minutes they would be close enough for all practical purposes.

And it feels like that's where we are today. Alexa is mostly practical - but not as good as a human butler. Self-driving cars are mostly practical - as long as you're in an area where they've been adequately trained. The Metaverse mostly works - but no one really cares.

There's a distinction between working, working well enough, and working well.

But it gets exponentially harder with each step.

I waved a rectangle of black-and-white squares in the vicinity of an optical scanner. The tiny computer's eye caught a fleeting glimpse of the barcode, de-skewed, rotated, and deciphered it - then checked its contents against a database. After a few milliseconds of deep thought, it opened the gates for me.

I handed over my passport to the border guard. They verified the cryptographic signature embedded in a chip, nestled deep within the document. Seeing it was valid, they waved me through the border.

I jumped on a train which sped 160 km/h underneath the sea! Although there's no WiFi 45m under the seabed, the rest of the time my various devices happily slurped up the bits from the æther.

I emerged blinking into a new city. My phone immediately latched on to a dozen satellites 20,000Km above my head. Within a few seconds it had pinpointed me to within 10 metres. I knew where I was. I received a text on my phone - my wife had tracked my journey and knew I'd arrived safe and sound.

My phone complies with all modern standards and frequencies; it spotted a 4G signal straight away. My SIM card did the usual authentication and negotiation dance with the local networks and they quickly granted me access. I have an IP address, therefore I am.

An army of volunteers had already mapped the city - down to the last restaurant, bench, and fire-hydrant. I knew where I wanted to go, but not the quickest way. Luckily, several decades of route-finding algorithm research kicked in and presented me with walking options.

The city's public transport timetables were all in a standardised format, so I was also able to see which bus and trams I could catch. The live display showed me the next bus was snagged in traffic a couple of streets away and wouldn't arrive for a while.

It was late, and I didn't fancy walking through an unfamiliar city. I know my locked phone is useless to a thief - unless they force me to unlock it - and can easily be tracked if stolen. But I could do without the inconvenience. So I opened up my taxi app - the same one I use at home - and a car arrived within a few minutes to take me to my hotel.

While waiting, I noticed a warning sign affixed to a lamppost. I don't speak the language, sadly. But I held my phone's camera up to it, and an instant translation appeared. It warned me that pickpockets operated in that area so I should keep my valuables hidden. I quickly put my phone in my pocket.

The conversation with the taxi driver was a little stilted. English was his 4th language, and none of the other 3 were ones I was conversant in. But voice-to-text-to-foreign-language worked well enough on the phone to have a pleasant conversation.

I'd like to say checking-in to the hotel was a magical experience where they recognised my iris prints and whisked me off to my room. But hotels are so 20th century! At least they gave me an RFID token to unlock my door - no magnetic strips to gradually demagnetise in my pockets, and no jagged bits of metal to scratch my screens.

I wandered down to a local restaurant. A happy community of vegans had already marked the best dining spots on a map and had left thoughtful reviews. I picked the one which had the opening hours updated recently.

Steered to a seat, I once again whipped out my phone and scanned the QR code on the table. It took me to a mobile website. There wasn't quite enough phone signal in the restaurant, so I hooked into their free Wi-Fi. A quick scan of their network showed they had proper client isolation, so I was lazy and didn't bother activating my VPN.

I tapped away on the menu - noting which standard allergens were present in each dish - and the food arrived quickly. Lovely! It was at this point my phone also started to complain about being hungry. Nestled next to my seat was the now-ubiquitous USB port. I slammed in a power-only USB cable (I doubt there was anything malicious behind the power socket - but computers are tiny and devious) and fed my helpful companion.

The bill came - as it always does - and I held a sliver of plastic next to the payment terminal. The funds were transferred instantly and with no transaction fees. Take that cryptocurrency!

On the way back to the hotel, I spotted ⚕️ - the Rod of Asclepius. I popped in to the pharmacy and picked something up to treat a minor complaint. The drugs were from a brand I recognised & trusted. Yes, I know it's lovely that each country has its own name for the same chocolate bar - but sometimes it is handy to have a standard name and logo which are easily recognised by those in a hurry.

A quick videocall with my wife as I walked down the street - two different phones, one encrypted app.

I finished the evening by hooking an HDMI cable between my laptop and the hotel room's TV so I could watch a movie streamed from my home server. Despite being in HD, a modern codec had squeezed it into a minimal file size. And, despite being in a strange country, my cable fitted perfectly.

Obviously, I stuck all my gadgets on charge before falling asleep. The laptop, headphones, and phone all take USB-C, so I didn't have to faff with lots of different charging bricks.

I gratefully fell into bed. My phone had already detected the time-zone change and knew to wake me at 07:30 local time.

The next morning, as I entered the office where I'd be working, I flashed yet another QR code at the entrance. Someone scanned it with their phone and verified that I was vaccinated against you-know-what.

And thus the week continued.

Was everything perfect? No. But that was rarely the technology's fault. It worked near flawlessly.

I remember having to hold huge paper maps to navigate around a city. Flimsy travellers' cheques for payment. Never knowing if the thing you wanted to see was open that day. Needing a different SIM - and sometimes a specific phone - if you dared leave your country's airwaves. Tiny phrasebooks with outdated slang and dubious translations. Pumping coins into a call-box to let people know you'd landed safely. Turning up to a transport hub only to find things were cancelled. Menus in incomprehensible languages. A scribbled bit of paper stapled in a passport as a vaccine certificate. A dozen different cables and adaptors for power and video.

Don't let anyone misguide you with rose-tinted nostalgia - the old world was rubbish!

I know at its heart, this has been a story about privilege. I went to a modern city with excellent tax-subsidised infrastructure. I have credit cards and I can afford a passport. My phone is new enough to do all the things I want. And I'm rarely troubled by cat-callers or other harassers when walking around a strange city.

But the future is now. I can seamlessly use my personal tech in a different country. I can navigate, pay, live, and survive. All mediated by tiny silicon wafers, high-frequency radio waves, and humble barcodes. The present is magical.

We live at a time when billions have access to unbelievably powerful technology. The most extraordinary tool that has been invented in the last century, the smartphone, is forcing radical changes in the way we live and work - and unlike previous technologies it is in the hands of just about everyone. Coupled with the rise of social media, this has ushered in a new era of deeply personal technology, where individuals now have the ability to work, create and communicate on their own terms, rather than wait for permission from giant corporations or governments. At least that is the optimistic view.

This is a deeply personal book. Not just for the author - as he details the way technology has affected his Parkinson's prognosis - but also for me. At times it feels like Rory has mined my work history for an array of tech anecdotes!

I was in the smartphone industry when the iPhone was launched. Rory perfectly captures the bewilderment of the tech sector, the frenzied reaction, the "this'll-change-everything" mentality. The world was upended and Rory talks us through the ripples it caused in and beyond the industry.

Similarly, the behind-the-scenes view of the development of the Raspberry Pi is fascinating. I never knew just how tangled a path it took to get launched. We get the scoop on the false-starts and setbacks which, almost inevitably lead to great success. The ride through the explosive rise of social networking is similarly exciting - and he's honest about where his predictions of success and failure were wide of the mark.

And then, we get the scoop on how it all went wrong. The rise of the web leads to the rise of the scammer. He expertly skewers the con-artists, self-promoting hucksters, and hype-chasers. The chapter on the Spinvox scandal is revelatory. A real insider's view of the way a story develops and its repercussions for all involved. Musk gets a similar treatment. What starts with a promise to change the world is quickly shown to be hollow words from up with a cruel, ego-driven man.

The inevitable discussion on whether too much screen time is bad for the youth of today (probably not) is well handled. And the bizarre conspiracy theories around 5G are treated with the appropriate sympathy.

There's a whole chapter on the NHSX Covid tracing app. Obviously I was extremely close to that story, but it's an extremely fair assessment of its development. It is bizarre to see one's sleepless nights captured and retold in the media!

And, in a flash, it's over. I'd happily have read a dozen more chapters.

Thanks to NetGalley for the preview copy. The book is released in a few weeks and can be purchased using the links below.

A font file contains a list of characters (usually letters, numbers, and punctuation) and glyphs (the drawn representation of that character). It is, of course, a lot more complicated than that.

Each character has a codepoint which is represented in hexadecimal. For example, U+0057 is the Latin letter Capital W, U+20AC is the Euro Symbol €, and U+1F600 is the Emoji Smiling Face 😀. These codepoints are assigned by the Unicode Consortium.

A font which contains thousands of characters will be multi-megabytes in size. That's annoying when downloading a font file to display text on a website in a particular font.

It is possible to create a "subset" of a font which only contains the characters that you want. This makes the font file smaller, which makes downloading things quicker for the user.

Again - it is all a lot more complicated than that, but it's a good approximation of the truth.

Traditionally, it makes sense to subset fonts by human languages. If you are writing in English, you don't want the Greek set of characters. If you're writing in Vietnamese, you don't want Cyrillic characters.

Once a subset has been created, you can refer to it in CSS like this:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'CoolFont';
  src: url(https://example.com/font.woff2) format('woff2');
  unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131;
}

This tells the web browser that the font covers the characters U+0000 to U+00FF and, additionally, the character U+0131 - "Latin Small Letter Dotless I".

U+0000 to U+007F are "Basic Latin". They contain the traditional English letters, numbers, and some symbols.

U+0080 to U+00FF are "Latin-1 Supplement". They contain "European" symbols like Ñ, å, and ÿ.

As Unicode has added more languages, they have scattered characters across the specification. And that's where the problem lies.

The Problem

A user in India has complained that Google's font subsetting ignores Indian users.

Here's an example.

Google's Roboto font has the following characters as part of its Latin subset:

• U+0000-00FF Basic Latin and Supplement
• U+0131 ı Latin Small Letter Dotless I
• U+0152-0153 Œ and œ Ligature Oe
• U+02BB-02BC ʻ and ʼ Modified Punctuation
• U+02C6 ˆ Modifier Letter Circumflex Accent
• U+02DA ˚ Ring Above
• U+02DC ˜ Small Tilde
• U+2000-206F - General Punctuation
• U+2074 ⁴ Superscript Four
• U+20AC € euro sign
• U+2122 ™ Trade Mark Sign
• U+2191 ↑ Upwards Arrow
• U+2193 ↓ Downwards Arrow
• U+2212 − Minus Sign
• U+2215 ∕ Division Slash

You can argue how useful or not some of these characters are - but what's interesting is what's missing.

India has twice the number of English speakers as the United Kingdom.

A website written for an English speaking audience in India is likely to want the Latin subset of a font. But it will also want one local character - ₹ - U+20B9. The Rupee is the currency of India and its character is part of the "Currency Symbols" Unicode block.

So should the Rupee be part of the "Latin" subset?

Colonialism In Tech

The original complainant says:

this symbol [₹] is excluded (subsetted out) of many Latin fonts that originally included it due to an American assumption that English is not spoken in India.

I don't know whether their assumption about Google is correct. But it seems odd to specifically include € in Google's Latin subset, but not the Rupee. Latin is not synonymous with "European".

Through a quirk of history, the Dollar symbol - $ - is in Basic Latin. The Yen currency symbol - ¥ - is included in the Latin-1 Supplement, as is the Pound - £.

Roboto's Latin subset contains Old English characters like þ (Thorn) and Ð (Eth).

Are obsolete characters used only in mediaeval text really more important to include than the currency for a billion people?

Google do include the ₹ in their "Latin Extended" subset. So if an Indian user wants to use their currency, they need to download a separate font which includes 1,011 characters they don't need.

This is inefficient. It increases the download weight and energy usage of billions of people.

Some Simple Solutions

There are a few things which can be done here.

I think that Google probably should include a popular currency symbol in their Latin subset font. Yes, there's a risk that the font might grow in size as more useful symbols are added. And, no, Latin doesn't mean English and English doesn't mean Indian - but we're all trying to get along on this crowded planet. So let's be flexible.

Google could create an "en_IN" subset which includes all the popular and useful characters needed by an Indian audience. It seems like there is sufficient demand for it.

Users should use the Google Font API to create a subset which has only the specific characters they want. That way they aren't reliant on the whims of a megacorp to decide what counts for their language.

Finally, as developers, we should understand that what is "logical" and "orderly" isn't always how our users see things. We have a huge range of biases and unexamined assumptions. Some of the earliest foundations of computer science are based on a very rigid and limited set of assumptions about the world. Let's do our best to be more inclusive.

On the hard shoulder, of the wrong side of the road, they argued about whether the map really said that you could exit the Interstate from the left. And whether the entrance to our Holiday Inn would be clearly signposted. Meanwhile, my brother and I thought the baddies from The A-Team were going to machine-gun our car. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

My parents didn't get divorced. But we also never took another driving holiday in a foreign country.

My wife and I are both a bit crap at reading maps. But our driving holidays have been... uneventful. Google maps has calmly told us when and where to turn. When our route has been unexpectedly blocked, it doesn't complain, but serenely re-routes us. From New York to New Zealand, we've been free to drive without arguing.

In truth, I've no idea how many divorces are triggered by someone NOT READING THE BLOODY MAP PROPERLY. But I bet that number has decreased since GPS became ubiquitous and affordable.

Technology has many unintended third-order effects.

The rise of YouTube means that I now know how to rewire a plug socket, reset my boiler, properly hang a shelf, and correctly replace a door handle. No more expensive calls to a handyman! But it also means I'm over-confident, and require people to come out and fix my mistakes.

Similarly, recipe sites and tutorials encourage even the most inept cook to make something fantastic. Perhaps this has led to a surge in takeaways when the Ortolan buntings drowned in Armagnac prove too complex for the amateur chef.

It is said that mandatory motorcycle helmets reduced the number of young male organ donors. While Uber has reduced drunk driving, WhatApp has increased distracted driving.

Every little piece of technology we create goes on to have a far stranger impact than we could ever imagine.

I've boosted the contrast of those images. It's the sort of thing the human eye can detect under decent light, but cameras struggle with. At night, it isn't noticeable. But in daylight, the yellowing discolouration is pretty obvious.

To be clear, those photos are taken with the LEDs off. This is not caused by uneven light distribution.

If I'm charitable, it's a bit like the way paper books weather with age.

A few other people on MobileRead forum have noticed similar problems with their Boyue devices.

Because I'm lazy, I leave the reading light on all the time. Perhaps the heat from the LEDs has cooked the eInk. Or perhaps the glass is getting damaged. There's no screen protector on there which has decayed.

I bought the device from a Hong Kong seller on eBay with a UK warehouse. I've enquired about a warranty replacement as it is less than a year old, but I'm not hopeful.

The device is still readable. And you expect electronics to wear with age. But the yellowing is annoying. It is less apparent if I turn the edge lighting on, and set the colour temperature to warm.

Perhaps we'll see liquid cooled eReaders soon?

If you've experienced this - or know how to reverse it - please let me know.