The unusual story of Jim Kubicek, an IT consultant and business owner in Cumming, Georgia captured my attention recently. Due to a disagreement with the Cumming-Forsyth County Chamber of Commerce having unpaid bills, Jim’s company KIT cut off its services. What followed was the local Sheriff charging Jim with “theft by extortion”, “computer theft”, and “computer trespass”. All of these felonies could conceivably see Jim spending 45 years in jail. Incredibly, this is a small town with a population of 5,613, so I’d expect people like Jim are known to a large number of people in his local area. This is becoming a far-too-common cautionary tale we can learn from.
While reading The Formula, by Luke Dormhel, a treatise on the many ways computer (and other scientists) have attempted to quantify and algorithmically understand the world, I was struck by this idea of our past present and future. What kind of future are we looking at when humans are replaced by robots and even laws are being handled by artificial intelligence? The answer is, I don’t know, but it got me thinking.
Last year I had an idea: Create a really, really high quality newsletter. Reading technology related news is a daily and rigorous ritual for me, so why not take that effort and synthesize it into a curated list of “What to Read”? Many others are doing this, of course, but I felt the value for readers was to get it from your trusted technical advisor (I manage technology for a number of small and medium sized businesses). For many years this voracious appetite for news and information was only for myself, but I knew it was time to change that. Time to share this with the world.
The story is all too common: I go onto Kijiji (a Canadian Craigslist clone) and find what I had been looking for: an iPad. I see the post’s price and presume it’s an “anchor” price, so I start off asking if the device is available and if they’d take a lower number. What follows is finding out the iPad posting was misrepresented as a “personal” sale, when in fact it was a business selling the product at a firm price, quoted without tax. Another asshole muddying what’s known as the “grey” market for the rest of us. Too many of these types of experiences, and you start to wonder if this can ever be improved past this level of failed experiment.
You might think the two of these have nothing in common, but I find it surprising how these two share similar tactics. In fact, taking a similar approach to writing information in each place might improve your odds of getting that message accross clearly and concisely. You may be the type of person that writes one-word message in email and Tinder profiles; and this wouldn’t be an article for you. For everyone else, however, read on to see these two in action.
Flying to the archipelago of the Azores landed me square in the sights of Azores Airlines (a new brand flying under SATA). Their logo includes a whale fin and planes are adorned with a full-sized whale sticker. For good reason as Azores is the largest whale sanctuary in the world. Booking this flight deal on Expedia, I had never really heard of SATA before this trip. I’ll break down my experiences, flight costs, and let you know what I thought of this particular airline.
You might remember my mention of a way to help book authors combat piracy. It was an idea borne of a small simple conversation with a friend; and neither of us had read the book. In fact, at the time of writing that book, I had not read a physical paper book in years. This seemed like a great way to exchange ideas and help the author in our own small way (though, frankly as a bestseller, this book doesn’t need the help). Now that I’ve read it, I wanted to let you know what I think.
When I was asked to move a customer’s 2000-odd contacts and 13 gigabytes of mail to Google’s cloud services from his MacOS-based computer, I knew this was going to be more than a challenge. To complicate matters, he had been using Outlook as a POP3 client of Google Mail and kept all his folders locally in Outlook 2011. From the beginning, I knew this was going to be an undertaking but I have some tips to help you face these particular challenges.
Activation lock is a service in Apple’s iOS and iOS compatible devices that (when enabled), keeps a device from being setup or reinstalled while still registered in Apple’s iCloud. I recently face an iPad Mini that was legitimately owned, but mostly bricked because of this feature. I’ll show you how to get around this, and why it’s one of Apple’s worst ideas.
By now you’ve probably noticed the photos I share have two distinct attributes. First, none of them are watermarked with a name, company or otherwise. Second, the photos come with titles and (relatively) long captions. Furthermore, I work to give you access to the highest possible resolution of each photograph. Why? I’ll fill you in on my process, and offer some tips about what you should do both of these very contentious ideas in photography.