Society Archives - Page 3 of 4

Twit(ter) Houses

Articles about the impending smartification of home appliances always crack me up:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514941/home-tweet-home-a-house-with-its-own-voice-on-twitter/

Because they always remind me of one of Ray Bradbury’s finest short stories from the days when rocket ships and going to Mars and the horrors of thermonuclear war were all eminently possible:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains_(short_story)

The article’s protagonist’s ending quote is golden:
“When the dishwasher or the washing machine are running, I want them to tell me when they’re finished or how long there is to go,” he says. “I want that kind of information, because it’s just irritating not knowing.”

Which raises the existential question:
If he’s home, he’ll probably hear the ending beeps. But if he’s not home, and a bear shat in the woods, what difference would it make?

I’m not sure what the global market for smarter home appliances is, or ever will be. But I’m guessing its appeal is somewhere between 3D movies at home and internet-capable televisions that require text input via on-screen keyboards. There may be benefits, but just getting them set up might be such a hair-tearing experience, that the average user won’t bother.

In any case, I do know that the last thing I’ll probably ever need is something like the following:

Splitting Headaches

So I’m looking for a pair of cables to adapt a 4-pin 3.5mm TRRS headphone + mic jack to 2 x 3-pin 3.5mm TRS jacks, because I want to do a little audio synthesis experimentation with my Android tablet and phone. But I’ve now learned that just because they wanted to and for no good reason beyond screwing consumers for overpriced accessories, Apple took an existing standard, forked it, and then patented it.

Now I’m not sure which cable to buy, because no one clearly marks the standard to which their cables conform, and the cables are incompatible with one another, because the bureaucracy was asleep on the job and for low-end commodity goods like wire and headphone splitters, who actually wants to take the time?

Here is the schematic from Nokia’s patent filing “Detection, Identification and Operation of Pheripherals Connected Via an Audio/Video-Plug to an Electronic Device” (October 24, 2005), columns #1 and #2 being most relevant:

This is the Nokia-patented 4-pin connector.

Here is the schematic from Apple’s patent filing “Audio I/O headset plug and plug detection circuitry” (January 5, 2007), row #1 being most relevant:

This the Apple-patented 4-pin connector.

Note that the only difference is the reversal of the microphone and ground positions. This is 100% bullshit masquerading as progress. I don’t see how this isn’t consumer hostile or how this in any way fosters healthy competition. I don’t see how the USPTO and other patent-granting bodies could see this and somehow consider it a reasonable thing to allow. This helps no one, not even Apple’s customers. It’s just a spiteful bit of “engineering”.

So when you wonder why you can’t just reuse that headset + mic you got for your Apple device on any other device you may have bought on the open market, this is the reason why.

(* Hat tip to the Norwegian Wikipedia page that stoked my curiosity.)

Update: Ok, I realize this post is a bit unfair to Apple, this is ultimately a problem with the way intellectual property is assigned. It is, of course, not the government’s job to decide the pinout for an audio headset. But it still strikes me as extremely stupid that intellectual property rights cause situations like this to happen. Since the functionality to control your phone or music player via an inline controller + mic has spread to all of the devices on the market anyway, what was the point of utterly bifurcating something simple into two incompatible standards? It seems to have been done only so that one party could avoid the other party invoking their IPRs, to the detriment of everyone.

Small Time Criminals

This is awesome.

One, because it’s classically unoriginal in that the crooks were doing exactly what crooks in movies always do: flash cash and get caught.

Two, because it’s a direct consequence of corruption in politics that prevents the United States Congress from ever mandating the use of smartcard/chip-and-PIN-based ATM cards. If the U.S. ever decided to do this, the rest of world would also breathe easier, because they would no longer have to support the pure magstripe-based withdrawal system that only Americans actually need, and which compromises their security everywhere they go to spend money.

The underside of the tablet

What I want to see on all next-gen tablets: a backside panel covered with solar cells under a Gorilla Glass surface. Corning also has bendable Willow Glass for curved surfaces or for scooped edges, so I could see printed cells working too. It kills me that I can’t just lay my Android tablet face-down in the sun and have it trickle charge. It wouldn’t take more than a handful of milliwatts to keep the battery topped up.

Think about it: you can run a 3rd generation Apple TV unit, decoding Full HD video, with less than a watt of power. Most of the tablets and smart phones on the market can pull off the same trick.

With the whole solar industry getting killed by overproduction, why not move to soak up that capacity? If the price per watt is something like 90 cents, and the surface area required is about the size the size of a tablet-back, then in my mind there’s no sense in not engineering something useful like this into your products. Especially since all of these devices are struggling to differentiate themselves in the market anyway. Sustainable tech strikes me as a nice angle to play.

Update: Of course, on second thought, the bigger question is whether the upfront costs in energy and raw materials of producing additional solar panels to power/charge a tablet would be made up during the lifecycle of the average tablet. On that point, the answer is probably no, which indicates bigger problems in consumption anyway.

Symmetric Earbuds

If you’re going to build earbuds that are symmetric, please be bothered enough to mark the right-side bud with red somewhere, or make them slightly asymmetric and put a little raised bump in the plastic so I can tell without even looking which side is which. Having to inspect the labels on the underside of the earbuds every time I want to put them in properly is just stupid and a bad user experience.

Update: Shoot, I checked the broken earbuds I just replaced. Indeed, there is a small plastic bump on the right-side earbud, so you could figure out which side was which in the dark. And those earbuds were even asymmetric, so the bump wasn’t strictly necessary.