Measuring me.

I’m starting to quantify my life using a fitness tracker. Not sure how it helps, though. blog.mindrocketnow.com

Part of the reason for not getting an Apple Watch was that I had a much cheaper Jawbone Up24 wrist band. I’ve been wearing the band for a while now, and it’s time to write down my impressions.

My main quibble is that I don’t know what it’s for. I know what it does: count steps, discreet alarm, tracks sleep. I just don’t know how all that improves me.

Take step counting: I like that I can measure how active I’ve been during the day. However, counting the steps hasn’t spurred my to make more of them. I still walk as much as I normally do, and work still gets in the way of walking more. Verdict: 6/10.

Tracking sleep is even less useful for me. I’m skilled at sleeping. If only it paid enough, I’d be a bed tester, working from home. Tracking sleep is pointless, because it takes me conscious targeted activity to not fall asleep. Verdict: 3/10.

I do like the discreet alarm function of the wrist band. I no longer have to have the iPhone next to my bed because wristy is my new discrete alarm clock. My 5am alarm to get to the airport now needn’t wake DW (although I make it a point that she knows how grumpy I am at that time). It apparently even goes off at the time just before 5am when I’m at my least grumpy (that bit doesn’t work – I’m still grumpy). I also like the inactivity alarm, which reminds you when you’ve been sitting for too long. Verdict: 10/10.

Finally, I love the battery life. It lasts a week between charges, under normal usage. I don’t have to worry about battery husbandry, it’s always there, always on, doing its thing. That should be true of all gadgets. Verdict: 10/10.

Overall, there’s only one function that really improves my life, and a couple that are meh. My buying decision is therefore based upon how cheap it is, i.e. whether I can immediately mentally amortise its purchase price. I got it for less than £50, which for me is the sweet spot. Overall verdict: 6/10; useful but not indispensible.

It's too easy to hold onto our digital rubbish.

Be honest, you're a digital hoarder, aren't you? But by not deleting now, I risk not finding again in the future. blog.mindrocketnow.com 

Hard drive space is cheap, cloud space is free (up to a certain amount), why wouldn't you hang onto it, just in case? My generation still remembers how fragile physical media can be - old photos fade, cassettes stretch, pages in books yellow as the chlorine leaches out - so why take the risk?  We've also experienced hard drive failure, catastrophic loss of data just before the presentation needs to be delivered, needing a weekend of retracing mental footsteps to recreate what was never as good as the original. 

Faced with the consequences of getting it wrong, you can sympathise with why it's easier to decide to store and decide to deal with it later, than to spend the cognitive effort to weed out digital files. 

But why is it difficult to make this decision? Perhaps it's because it's because we can't tell the difference between a digital object and a digital possession. A possession has imbued value, either at the time of first acquisition (primary value) or in the future (secondary value). This value is perceived through the lens of our own values, which is why possessions are fragments of our own identity. The dissonance with digital is that primary value is often low (a single digital selfie has essentially zero incremental cost) whereas the secondary value can be extremely high (who knows if that selfie will be a memory to cherish in years to come)? We would need to work harder to figure out the secondary value of a digital item, so we put it off for later. 

This idea goes some way to understanding why subscription models are more popular than pay-per-use models. Even if a subscription is more expensive than buying individually, e.g. for low usage, they are generally more popular because there's no additional effort required to value the content. At the same time, this unwillingness to value the individual content means that we incorrectly value the digital artefact, which has caused such disruption to the digital media industry, and the rise of freemium. 

Interestingly, though every post to Facebook has the potential to last forever, the Internet is not immune to the forces of entropy. There's a cost to recovering a specific item of data, and the cost increases as time goes on. The moment after you've made that post to MySpace, you'll have to search to find it again. 100 days  later (the average life of a web site), the service will have been bought and sold and databases ported, corrupted, and only partially recovered, links will decay and point to 404. Five years later, operating systems will have changed, and specialist tools will be needed to find that post again. Ten years later, the hardware won't be sold any more and you'll have to go to eBay or a museum to get more blank media. 

This is a good thing. Death is a part of life, and so digital rust should be a part of digital life. The right to be forgotten is as important as the right to be remembered.  

There's also a pleasure to going through our digital possessions. Those digital objects that survive the updates and upgrades naturally acquire the value imbued by the weight of time. I think I'm going to have a look at my old digital photo albums now... 

For more, have a listen to the Digital Human podcast.

Apple Pay in the UK.

WWDC quick verdict: WatchOS 2 = what? Music, Maps = Meh. El Capitan, iOS 9 and Pay = yay. blog.mindrocketnow.com 

I couldn't let WWDC go past without making comment. For personal impact, it was a mixed bag. Apple Music is distinctly meh - it's just too expensive. Maybe when DD2 gets into music properly, we'll invest in a family account just to keep her legal, but the sad truth is that we don't listen to enough music to make it valuable. In fact, I'm considering cancelling my iTunes Match subscription.  

WatchOS 2 - yawn. There still aren't any compelling watch apps, so still no reason for me to buy one, so I really couldn't care less. 

Apple Maps with transit directions - sigh. Apple is so late to this particular party, that I'm going to stick with Google Waze and Google Maps just to make a point. 

OSX El Capitan is a silly name but is the first of the big announcements that made me pay attention. Under the hood changes may not bring any application changes of meaning, but it does mean that my 7 year-old MacBook will be fit for purpose for another year. I got a new Lenovo laptop with my new job. I prefer my MacBook. That's amazing engineering, and so amazing value from Apple. 

iOS 9 is also revolutionary for the same reason. It'll run on the iPhone 4S up to my 6+, and will realise battery improvements for each. My phone could even gain an extra hour, which means I don't need to charge it overnight any more (it gets charged by the car whilst doing SatNav duty just enough to keep it going until the next commute). DW still needs to have a charger wherever she sits as one of her multiple iDevices will be on red beans. I don't need a single charger in the house. 

Apple Pay makes me most excited, because it's the beginning of much more secure online transactions. It's not the bulging wallet effect that I'm worried about, but the fact that now my credit card will only be known by my bank, Apple, and me. The fewer people that know the secret of my credit card number, the more securely it'll be kept, and the safer my money will be.