[Fri Mar 20 18:25:03 CDT 2015]

I know I must have written about this topic over here before, but it's been drawing people's attention again when Apple officially introduced the new Apple Watch. They talked about it before, but the official announcement was not until last week, I think. Anyways, I still cannot see why anyone except perhaps wannabe hipsters and rabid Mac-heads (the latter a subset of the former, I suppose) would even care about this invention, at least not now. What does it offer that one doesn't already get from a smartphone, other than perhaps the image of being with the "in crowd"? Apparently, I'm not the only one with that view. The Verge publishes a piece by Josh Dzieza titled Apple doesn't want to talk about the real use for the Apple Watch that pretty much reaches the same conclusion:

The thing is, the watch does have a use case, it's just one that’s hard for Apple to talk about. Last week Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch wrote that the best thing about the watch, according to the Apple employees who’ve been demoing it, was that it let them basically stop using their phone. Instead of fishing their phones out of their pockets every couple minutes, they could check incoming notifications on the watch and choose to ignore or respond to them. Panzarino imagined a future where the watch helps us be less distracted and more present.

But how do you get up on stage and say that the best thing about this new gadget is that it lets people use this other gadget, the one you spent the last eight years turning into a fetish object, less frequently? Of course you still need an iPhone for the Apple Watch, so it’s not like the watch threatens to replace the phone — but rhetorically it’s a tricky argument to make. You’d have to acknowledge that people can have fraught relationships with their phones, and that their attachment to them is deeply ambivalent. True, I feel relief when I check my phone and anxious when its battery dies, but that’s a very different type of obsession than the sort Apple encourages in its lavish videos of cold-forged steel watch cases. It’s much more compulsive and dependent. Making the best pitch for the watch would mean acknowledging that devices can be burdens, not just tools for empowerment.

It’s also a paradoxical case to make. How do you tell people who feel queasy about being too immersed in their phones that the solution is buying another device that they physically strap onto their body and buzzes them whenever they get a message? Do you feel too plugged-in? Maybe you’re just not plugged in enough! Cook’s statement that the watch is "not just with you, it's on you" is both appealing — no need to compulsively reach for our phone — and ominously oppressive, depending on how you feel about your phone's incessant pings.

I'd go further, actually. I just don't see a use case for the device. At least not yet. Why switch to a smaller device that makes pretty much every single activity I'd do on the smartphone more cumbersome when I can already do it on a smartphone? Let's be real. It's not as if the smartphones are extremely annoying to carry about. It just fits into your pocket. What is the problem? We also carry our wallet there, which ends up being about the same size. So, again, until these new devices offer a clear value add, I just don't see how they will become as hot as people think. Maybe a few years from now things will change, but not now, I think. {link to this entry}

[Wed Mar 18 16:26:49 CDT 2015]

After spending quite sometime browsing through menus both on my iPad Mini and my Samsung Galaxy S5 tying to figure out how to sign out of Google Hangouts, I finally gave up and decided to search Google for the answer. In retrospect, I should have probably started doing that. It was way easier. I quickly found the answer for Android devices and also for iOS devices. What a pain! I was sick of people contacting me because they saw me "active" on my phone or tablet, when in reality I was working and not paying much attention to either device. {link to this entry}

[Sat Mar 7 10:23:17 CST 2015]

Here is an annoying issue I ran into while trying to perform a backup of my laptop last night. Since I use the same external USB drive to backup a few devices, including an old Apple laptop, I opted for using an HFS+ filesystem. Basically, that means that, in order to be able to write to it in Linux, I need to disable journaling on the filesystem. However, even after doing that, sometimes it just fails to mount read-write. For whatever reason, it mounts read-only. It doesn't do this consistently either. It just appears to do it out of the blue (or, at least, I haven't been able to figure out a pattern yet, perhaps in part because I just don't monut it that often, to be honest). In any case, when that occurs, simply checking the integrity of the filesystem seems to do the trick:

# fsck.hfsplus <disk_device>

{link to this entry}