[Tue Aug 26 19:34:22 CDT 2014]

I swear, no matter how hard I try, I still cannot understand all the hype over the arrival of the smartwatches. What on Earth would I need one of these for? Yes, sure, I know that certain people will buy them as soon as they have a chance just because they are gadget freaks. In other words, they will buy the latest gadgets they see announced, regardless of whether they truly need it or not. It's just who they are and what they do. Fine. But I'm just not sure enough regular people out there will truly need one of these. I mean, again, what for? Sure, I may not be the right guy to write about this. I'm just not very "normal". After all, last time I wore a watch (any watch) I was 18 or so. I'm 46. It's rained a lot since.

So, why did I survive without a watch for such a long time? Well, if anything, it helped me relax quite a bit. While prior to that I consistently checked the time every few minutes just because I could, as soon as I took it off time appeared to slow down. Stress went away. Did I miss it? Not really. Did you ever notice that there are clocks everywhere? Wherever you go. Most businesses and public places have one. Your computer has one. Heck, almost everybody you will walk by on the street has one. Just ask. More to the point, the last few years, with the ubiquity of the smartphone, we always carry a "watch" in our pocket. Or, to put it a different way, as far as I can see, the smartphone does whatever the smartwatch will do in the next few years, and then more. Yes, its form factor is a bit larger, which actually makes it better for most purposes (can you imagine texting, checking Facebook or watching a video on a smartwatch? It may very well be people's favorite invention in the mid- to long-term, but not now. I just cannot see it.

All this obsession with the smartwatch reminds me of the failed attempts to convince us all that we should navigate the Internet on "intelligent" TV sets back in the late 1990s and early 2000s? Remember that? There was a lot of talk about "convergence" in those days. The idea was that we'd consolidate all our devices on a single one, and that would most likely be the TV set. I still remember telling people back then that I just couldn't see it (yes, just like I cannot see the smartwatch being successful right now, at least not in the short term). Why would anyone bother to "converge" on the TV set when plenty of people were already using laptops, which allow far more mobility? And what to say of the interface? And the awkwardness of holding a keyboard and mouse from the sofa to interact with a device that was a few meters away? In the end, the smartphone took over just a few years later. Now, that made far more sense. It's a small, mobile device that goes everywhere with you and is big enough not to feel overly annoying when you are reading your email, reading a newspaper article or texting.

In conclusion, the smartwatch (or something similar) may very well be very successful in the mid- to long-term. Who knows? However, I just don't see it taking the world by storm anytime soon. I just don't see it. Sorry. {link to this entry}

[Fri Aug 22 17:27:51 CDT 2014]

My eldest, who likes to program as a hobby, just asked me today about the concept of header files in languages like C and C++, since he is more used to Java. Well, this and this document provide some good introductions. {link to this entry}

[Tue Aug 19 08:51:20 CDT 2014]

I can't believe that in all these years using the mutt email client I had never noticed that some messages may show a "K" next to it. For some reason, I saw it today, and didn't know if perhaps I had accidentally flagged the message myself. Well, in case you are also wondering, it only means that it contains a PGP public key, as explained in the section titled Status Flags from The Mutt E-Mail Client: Getting Started. {link to this entry}

[Thu Aug 7 11:30:20 CDT 2014]

I can imagine I'm not the only one who is running into a strange issue when using GNOME 3: after returning from suspend mode, the wifi connection fails to reconnect. As far as I could see, the only workaround was to manually disconnect, and then reconnect again. Well, that was until I found this thread on the AskUbuntu website that offers a solution: simply go to the Network Settings, click on the Wireless tab, choose your connection, click the Options button, make sure the password is entered and the box for "Connect automatically" is checked, then also make sure the box in the bottom left corner that makes it available to all users is checked. After that, it has been working flawlessly for me.