One of my new years resolutions for 2012 is to travel more, and to take more pictures and video while traveling so I can pretend I remember these trips when my inevitable senility sets in somewhere down the line.

Knowing I had an upcoming trip to Seattle, I debated whether or not to drag along my trusty warhorse camera, the Canon 5D Mk II. I love my camera, but it’s a big beast, and I wanted something I could carry around all day without it getting in the way. I also was interested in taking pictures without attracting a lot of attention from possible thieves.

A little googling led to the Fuji X100 after finding out that none of the rental places had Sony NEX-7s available, and the new Fuji X1 Pro won’t ship until late 2012.

It got really good reviews, it was small with a fixed lens, and the images looked good. I was sold. I rented from Lensrentals.com for about $25 a day with damage protection and shipping costs.

I don’t mean this to be an exhaustive review, just my impressions from 4 days of use. See the DPReview link above for a more comprehensive review.

The X100 really is something special. It’s a compact package with a really outstanding lens. The body mimics an older range finder design that’s really attractive. It feels incredibly solid in use and has a great adaptive viewfinder. I had a few people comment on the street about how cool it was to be using a film camera these days. Hah.

Manual dials for shutter speed, exposure compensation and aperture are really nice to have, especially considering how awful the menu system is on the camera. More on that later.

I was constantly afraid of losing the lens cap as there’s no way to attach it to the body or the lens. The cap pressure-fits to the lens which is helped out by some vaguely velvet matting on the inside. I would be concerned that over time the velvet will wear down and the caps fit will loosen enough for it to fall off by itself. Fuji apparently doesn’t sell replacements.

The Fuji’s 49mm lens filter threads are male instead of female, meaning you’ll need to buy a $50 adapter in order to use any filter in front of the lens. I don’t see how this is anything other than transparent money grab. So hack it instead.

The camera is bigger than a typical point and shoot, but much smaller than a modern DSLR. Which makes you much less conspicuous when shooting. You can also put the camera into a silent mode that makes it very hard to hear, kills the LCD screen and toggles off external LEDs. The camera essentially looks like it’s completely turned off. Great for street photography, or nieces who like me, love to make silly faces when cameras are around.

I am really impressed by the image quality of this camera. Fuji’s engineers did a superb job of pairing a nice sensor with a great lens. The camera produces great color with good contrast even on RAW files without the JPEG color modes to crank things up. I shot with the lens wide open almost the entire time and aside from some vignetting, it performed very well.

Low light performance is good up to ISO 1600, and images at 3200 are completely usable although pretty grainy. The X100 also preserves colors well, even in poorly lit scenes.

Auto white balance is actually the best I’ve seen on any camera so far, with only a few images needing to be tweaked. It’s actually one of the most impressive aspects of this camera.

Auto focus will hunt a bit in the dark, but it’s snappy enough during daylight. But you shouldn’t expect it to focus as quickly as a pro level DSLR. If you’re shooting in silent mode, the camera won’t use its AF assist light, making AF pretty unreliable. Make a note of that before complaining the camera can’t focus at night.

It’s good that the auto focus works fine, because the manual focus is a crime against humanity. It’s a focus by wire affair, with no physical pairing of the focus ring to the focus mechanism. This wouldn’t be the end of the world if Fuji hadn’t decided to require something like 5 full rotations of the ring to rack the focus from all the way in to all the way out. Manual focus is so bad on this camera that it would have been better to simply exclude it. Really.

When shooting at f2, the depth of field is very shallow, so you have make sure you’re focusing on what you care about. It’s easy to end up a little back or front focused at such a wide aperture.

My biggest gripe about the camera would probably be the lousy manual focus as it actually can hinder shooting in certain situations, but a very close second would be the incredibly terrible menu system. It’s stupidly bad, and I dreaded every time I had to go into the menus to change a setting, which you will have to do a lot.

Want to record a video? Buried in menus. Want to turn on the awesome included ND filter? Buried in menus. Change ISO or set it to auto? You get the idea. There are a lot of crucial features that can only be accessed through these menus, but good luck finding them without a manual. You can assign a Fn button near the shutter release to one of these functions, but you’ll wish you had 5 of those Fn buttons so you never had to see the menus again.

I suppose over time I would learn where all this stuff is by heart, but I really shouldn’t have to. Modern cameras offer some decent examples of how to handle camera menus, but it looks like Fuji just completely ignored them. Fuji. Hire some user experience designers. Seriously.

Oh and the back navigation wheel and button are stupidly small. I consistently hit the macro button instead of the center select button. I ended up having to use my thumbnail to hit the button consistently. Wearing gloves while shooting? Yeah no.

This is a camera with tradeoffs. Terrible interface, fantastic images. But overall, the lousy interface bits are more than made up for by the small size and great image quality. This is a camera you can take everywhere, but will still produce professional quality results.

I know I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on the negatives, so I should point out, I really really really like this camera. I had a ton of fun shooting with it. If there weren’t really strong competitors coming to market soon (Sony NEX-7 and Fuji’s own X1 pro) I’d probably buy this camera.

Why probably? If it was $600, this would be a no-brainer. I’d buy it today. But it’s currently selling for $1099 on Amazon. That’s too steep for me considering that this would be a secondary camera and the competition for near the same price is so compelling (NEX-7).

That said, if the NEX-7 continues to be in short supply for a few more months, I’ll be renting the X100 for my upcoming trips.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention when making the above price comparison that the Fuji’s 23mm lens is easily worth $300-400 dollars. Despite its distortion and vignetting, both of which are easily fixed, it’s a very sharp lens with great character. It also has none of the discoloration common to using wide primes on the Nex-7 or Leica M9.

It’s been a long time since I worked at an Apple Store, but some of Johnson’s examples were certainly not true when I worked for them. Given that I hate this kind of corporate mythology building, I’d like to address a few points. Keep in mind that I haven’t worked for Apple for over 7 years now, so this could have all changed.

There are lots of components to that experience, but maybe the most important — and this is something that can translate to any retailer — is that the staff isn’t focused on selling stuff, it’s focused on building relationships and trying to make people’s lives better.

This was definitely true for probably the first 2 years (or so) the stores were open. At around mid year 2, sales performance was tracked for every associate and was routinely used as a metric for performance raises and promotions. Sales numbers were monitored throughout the day, and you were pressured to make a certain number of sales every day. Sales information was shared across all stores, and managers were very competitive about beating other stores in sales volume. For almost my entire tenure at Apple Retail, they were extremely sales oriented and building relationships was something that people had to be reminded about. This was true for every store I worked in. It was deeply a part of the management culture.

The staff is exceptionally well trained, and they’re not on commission, so it makes no difference to them if they sell you an expensive new computer or help you make your old one run better so you’re happy with it.

While there was no commission, the “no difference” bit is not true at all. There was tremendous pressure to sell, and support was dumped off as often as possible to pursue customers who were buying new machines. Top sales people aggressively sought out new customers and avoided anyone who might take a long time, or were returning to ask additional questions on purchases they’d already made.

Their job is to figure out what you need and help you get it, even if it’s a product Apple doesn’t carry. Compare that with other retailers where the emphasis is on cross-selling and upselling and, basically, encouraging customers to buy more, even if they don’t want or need it.

This is the comment that got me to write this little post because this was the thing that pissed me off most while working for apple. First off, Applecare was pushed aggressively and sales staff were rewarded for having high attach rates. But you can make an argument about why it was good for customers to have. But during my time there was also a massive push to attach .mac accounts on people, even on people who had no use for it and didn’t understand what it did. Everyone working in the store knew what a crappy service .mac was, and no one wanted to even try selling it, but it was another stick to be used against us in performance reviews. Attach rates in general were certainly tracked on all sales from printers to monitors, and it was always the more the better.

It’s not easy, of course. People forget that the Apple Store encountered some bumps along the way. No one came to the Genius Bar during the first years. We even had Evian water in refrigerators for customers to try to get them to sit down and spend time at the bar. But we stuck with it because we knew that face-to-face support was the very best way to help customers.

This one confused the hell out of me. No one came into the stores let alone the genius bar over the first few years because no one knew we were there. In the beginning Apple wouldn’t advertise individual stores, so if you weren’t in a flagship location you weren’t getting traffic. We complained about this. A lot.

In addition to that Apple was still confused about whether to send people to the call centers, the authorized service providers, the consultants network or to the genius bar. At first the call centers refused to send people to the Apple stores because they didn’t know or trust the geniuses. The genius bars didn’t struggle because of customers, it struggled because Apple has always sucked at managing and running the service side of the business and the bars were no different.

These days the stores are nothing like what I remember. They’re constantly packed with people and honestly I hate shopping in them. Seeing the constant chaos around the genius bar makes me wonder how the current crop of geniuses aren’t constantly popping quaaludes to get through the day.

I’m sure everyone who uses Netflix is already painfully aware of Netflix’s price change debacle and the ensuing shitstorm of media coverage. They didn’t explain the price changes to customers, and didn’t give customers very long to decide on how they’d like to react.

But two days ago, CEO Reed Hastings took some ownership and decided to set things right with this blog post and this video.

Both are insincere and far from transparent about why Netflix is actually making its changes. Saying “we think the businesses are going in different ways, so we needed to separate them” is the same thing as saying nothing at all. The core question of “Why the hell is Netflix doing this?” remains completely unanswered.

So we all get to speculate, and I love that game, so here’s my speculation.

If Hastings could speak his mind the real answer would go something like this:

“Our content partners are assholes, and they are effectively forcing this change. But we are completely at their mercy because we need their content to stay relevant.”

Lets break this down

DVDs:
Movie and TV studios get DVD rentals. It’s an existing model that’s been around for a long time, with established players. Everyone knows the drill. Release schedules, prices, terms, all that stuff has been worked a long time ago. Netflix does the same dance that every other DVD rental outfit does and everything has natural physical limits, i.e. number of DVDs sold to the rental outfit. Netflix introduced massive disruptive change into the market, but it was change that didn’t mess up the content producers. In fact, the content producers liked it because Blockbuster and Hollywood were nearing monopoly status on rentals and had a lot of leverage to use against the content providers.

The great thing about DVDs and having a physical product is that it doesn’t matter if the content provider doesn’t like you. Copyright law in the US says you can buy those DVDs from whoever you want and rent them out. Netflix can truck right on over to Walmart and buy all the latest releases. So the content providers can’t really play favorites and starve Netflix out of business. Even if they wanted to. If it’s for sale, it’s for rent.

So the DVD business is about a nice website, distribution and operational efficiency. Netflix has already won this war. But it’s a Pyrrhic victory because Netflix has spent a ton of time and energy fighting to be the best at something customers increasingly don’t want.

So if Hastings could speak his mind about DVDs it would go something like this:

“We know there will always be a DVD rental business, but it’s a commodity market that we pretty much own. We’re so confident that our competitors are incompetent that we feel comfortable spinning off the whole brand, and letting the B team run the show. But we also know this market is only going to get smaller and smaller.”

Streaming
Streaming media, to steal a phrase from Steve Jobs, is a just a bag of hurt. Content providers aren’t just partners in the value chain anymore, they’re potential (or actual) competitors. Like almost every other business in the world, the internet is removing middle men, especially if they aren’t clearly providing value. Content owners can increasingly build their own streaming infrastructure and bypass outlets like Netflix.

And there are none of the protections that exist for the sales and rental of DVDs. Content companies can license their content to whoever they want, for whatever price they want. If they want to punish Apple with high prices, and reward Amazon for playing ball, there are no obstacles in place. And since so much of the content we want to watch is produced by only a handful of major players, content providers essentially get to set the terms by which streaming video providers get to continue to exist. Hulu learned this lesson the hard way, and they’ve now more or less caved into every demand; delayed content, extremely limited time availability, a paid package that still includes ads, etc.

Netflix has no position of strength here, and the price increases are just the first of a long list of concessions that the major studios will demand of Netflix if they want to continue to exist.

I imagine Hastings would say this about streaming:

“Netflix now has two main jobs: build a reliable and available streaming infrastructure backed by a great recommendation engine and create a first class negotiation and legal team to handle the never ending licensing negotiations with our content partners”

If I was personally running Netflix I would also add to that list creating a significant lobbying presence in Washington to start tackling the nasty world of copyright law around digital content, and the very real threat of bandwidth shaping by major residential internet providers, many of whom are owned by the same companies as the content providers.

Bring it home

So you can see why it actually makes some sense to separate the two companies. They are both facing separate and distinct challenges that are pulling them in separate directions.

But it’s very clear where they’re placing their bets. Streaming gets the Netflix brand. Streaming gets the A-list talent. Streaming is the future, even if it’s a very uncertain one. They need the big guns to play in the cut-throat world of content licensing, and they need to segregate the DVD part of the business from the possible blowback.

But part of playing this game is lying to your customers while wearing a shit-faced grin and pretending this was all your idea. You can’t bad mouth the studios without paying for it big time in your next round at the negotiating table.

That’s why Hastings looks like this: While reiterating how very very sorry he is about how poorly Netflix communicated around the price increases. This is clearly a man consumed by remorse. He actually looks like he’s on the verge of laughing for the last 3rd of the video.

Asides

While writing this post, an interesting thing occurred to me. One of the reasons that Amazon and Apple haven’t fallen into this same trap is DRM. For all intents and purposes, if you want to sell someone a book to read on the Kindle, you have to sell it through Amazon. If you want to sell a video to be watched on the iPad, you have to sell it through iTunes. If you want protection for your content and access to their customers, you’re just as locked in as the customers are.

The only way to get around that is to remove DRM and then you’re in the same place the music business is: competing with free. So if you want your cushy profit margins, you have to give some of that cut to Amazon or Apple. Netflix does not enjoy this same advantage.

Netflix is in a really bad place, and they’ve got a lot of work ahead of them. Bullshitting your customers is a terrible policy, but they will increasingly have no choice in the matter as the studios bully them into submission. I wish them luck, but I’m not sure how long I’ll keep my current streaming subscription.

The recent retirement of Steve Jobs was as emotional for me as I think it was for a lot of Apple fans. Steve wasn’t just the CEO of Apple. He was the figurehead for not just Apple, but for a sensibility about what role computers should play in our lives.

My early childhood was in many ways defined by computers, mostly Apple computers. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to work for Apple when I grew up.

By the time the Apple retail stores opened, I had been fixing Macs professionally for 3 years, and informally for many years before that. I was really good at fixing macs. I knew OS 9 inside and out, and I had worked on every Mac that had been made. I could fix most modern Macs of the time without manuals, and could in many cases could be handed a pile of different screws and tell you exactly were they went in a machine.

By the time Apple hired me as a Mac Genius, I had put in much more than Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours.

By that time I had already seen a lot of Apple’s uglier side. Apple had started beating up on Apple Authorized Resellers, and their service organizations well before the opening of the stores. Apple service became much more like a supply chain management operation than a customer service operation.

So when I took the dive into the Apple stores, I thought “this is going to be different. This is going to be Apple’s chance to do it right”. I already had friends working in the stores, and the reports I heard back were good. So I took the leap, and I was finally working for Apple Computer.

The first year or had its ups and downs, but by and large, it was really great. But it rapidly went downhill. I eventually came to the conclusion that Apple didn’t really care about repairing people’s computers. By the time I quit, I was extremely burned out, and angry at Apple.

Since then, I’ve always wondered by Apple cared so much about developing new products, but seemed to hate fixing them when they broke.

It wasn’t until Steve’s retirement that a lot of things clicked for me. Apple has always wanted to make things simpler, reduce complexity, and get things right the first time.

When you have to fix a computer, that means you didn’t get it right. It went out the door with a flaw or a bug, and you’ve created a bad experience. Yes you can try and recover from that experience, but it’s not the same as never having had it happen.

What I ultimately realized is that Apple didn’t want people like me, people who had figured out all the flaws, and knew how to fix them or work around them once a product was already in a customer’s hands. Apple wanted people who would make sure those problems never happened in the first place. Steve didn’t want people who could fix broken products, he wanted products that didn’t break.

But computers do break. Don’t you want people who can fix them available to your customers? Nope. Here’s why. People who can fix them are also people who can pull back the curtain on all the complexity that goes into making something simple. They are the people who remind customers that Apple’s products are computers, not tools for getting things done, or windows into the internet, or ways to connect with your friends and family.

Why doesn’t apple publish details on RAM amounts or processor specs on iPhones? Because it should never matter. The phone should be able to do the things you want to do flawlessly regardless of its hardware specs. Witness the HP touchpad, better specs than an iPad, but can’t scroll a webpage smoothly. The experience matters.

I was a genius of the old school. I exposed customers to how computers worked. What I didn’t figure out until much later was that nobody gives a shit about how computers work except for computer geeks. A service person who knows a lot about computers reminds people how much they don’t know. And they really shouldn’t have to know.

Steve’s vision far preceded Apple’s ability to deliver a computer that “just worked”. It needed people like me, but it didn’t want them. So I eventually quit. But now I understand why I felt like I didn’t fit at Apple, or at least at Apple Retail.

A recent post over at FiveThirtyEight pointed out the increasing popularity of Texas Governor Rick Perry, and how he may start being a concern to more mainstream candidate Mitt Romney.

It should be noted that Michelle Bachmann is making strong showings in all of these polls as well.

I’d first like to point out that these early polls are essentially meaningless, and I personally think they’re borderline unethical to conduct. They survey the wrong people, and they ask bad questions. They have a long history of being worthless, yet they keep being conducted, so you inevitably have to deal with the media fallout of their results.

The most common form this takes is “Hey this insane, borderline theocrat may actually become president!” For some people that’s a sign the country is headed in the right direction. For others, it’s a bleak indictment of our nation and how far we’ve strayed from the enlightenment principles on which we were founded.

Either reaction is the product of bad information. Information delivered by a sensationalist, self-obsessed press who long ago learned to sell drama and conflict over substantive analysis.

But it also serves to mask the true nature of presidential elections in the US. It creates the illusion of a diverse pool of candidates, each of whom could potentially take the US into the future that most appeals to each of us. But that diversity is largely illusory. Those candidates who actually win their national party nominations are usually not very far apart ideologically speaking, and the final campaign months are typically spent fighting over those minor differences, which only serves to exaggerate them.

The extreme right wing represented by Bachmann and Perry do have genuine ideological differences not only with the left, but with their own party.

When most republican politicians say they want a smaller government, what they mean is that they want an ineffective regulatory body which is powerful but corruptible and controllable. While democratic politicians can’t really call for small government, they have essentially wanted the same thing (at least since Bill Clinton).

Perry and Bachmann (and Ron Paul for that matter) actually want a dismantled and diminished federal government which forces power and money down to the state level where it is more easily funneled to local special interests.

This is a major divide. And in many ways a larger divide than exists between democrats and republicans.

Largely speaking, politicians of both parties agree on the single largest point of policy in modern politics – the role of the federal government. Now I can hear you having an aneurysm from here, so just take some deep breaths while I explain this.

The debate you will hear in the constant drum beat of election coverage, and the current struggles between the president and congress is all about the role of federal government! And it’s completely divisive! It’s what has our whole government ground to a halt. How could I possibly say they agree?

Because they do agree. The role of the federal government in modern america is to protect corporate interests from international competition. While the different parties may differ on their justifications for this, and some of those reasons may even be morally defendable, there is no genuine disagreement. America is all-in on globalized capitalism, and this was a choice we made a long time ago. The captains of industry hold the US captive just as surely as they do most 3rd world countries. We are now a plutocracy.

Don’t believe me? Read the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks. Here’s a few examples. I’ve read about a hundred of them and the picture they paint is not pretty. The State Department now spends a great deal of its diplomatic capital as the lobbying arm of large corporations.

But this should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention. Large scale and widespread corporate crimes simply go unpunished. Wholesale illegal market manipulations by international banks are met with small fines, or completely ignored. The supreme court has spent much of its current session actively protecting corporations, against standing precedent.

But I think ideologues like Perry and Bachmann legitimately either don’t know, or don’t understand the shifts that government has made over the last 30 years. They don’t understand that by wanting to diminish the power of the federal government, you diminish its power to serve corporate interests in the global economy. That effectively means the US ceases to be a world power. No one currently in power is going to let that happen.

Which is why Perry and Bachmann will never be serious contenders for the presidency. No one who honestly wants a smaller government will ever be allowed a serious shot at the presidency from either party. But it definitely serves a purpose to let Perry and Bachmann get out there and squawk. They get to be the voice of middle class white frustration, the republicans’ populist play in the face of a still strong hatred for being screwed by global capitalism.

Just to hedge my bets here a little: I can see Perry getting the republican nomination in one circumstance; the republicans are certain they won’t win 2012. If they feel that way (which we’ll probably know by early next year), it doesn’t make sense to run a credible candidate and have them lose. It will make it harder to sell that candidate in 2016. It’s much better to throw someone to the wolves cough McCain cough, and let your real pick build up credibility for when there’s not an incumbent in office.

Update 1/19/2012:

Bachmann dropped out of the presidential race on January 4th and Perry gave it up Today. Our disgraceful media organizations cynically pumped 5 months of juicy fundamentalist insanity from them and now they’re onto the Gingrich/Santorum crazy train. Gingrich, despite being one of the most corrupt politicians in recent memory, may in fact have a shot at the nomination, but I think it’s a long one.

Rick Santorum however holds no shot. Don’t get me wrong, he brings the best of both conservative worlds, he’s right up there with the best of them on christian insanity, but unlike Perry and Bachmann, he’s a huge fan of big government and whoring himself out to corporate lobbying interests. He loves war, and thinks it’s just peachy that iranian nuclear scientists are showing up dead all over the place. This could make him an appealing candidate to his party, if he wasn’t quite so goody goody.

See, Santorum isn’t just a prayers in schools, bring Jesus back to the government kind of guy. He’s prudish moralist. He wants to outlaw contraceptives. He wants to make pornography illegal. He wants a total ban on abortion, even when it’s necessary to save the mother. He’s said that he wants civil law to reflect christian religious law.

The republican party is still in a shambles from Bush’s administration. How long do you think it would take the republican party to recover from a poor Bush impersonator with a heaping helping of ultra conservative Catholicism?

His point was that ultimately all the money made by corporations goes to people, so raising taxes on those corporations taxes all of the people who make money from them. And while he didn’t mention it, “tax corporations” is usually liberal code for “tax rich people”.

In some ways, Romney is right in saying corporations are people. They are granted human rights for some inexplicable reason. But that’s not the point he’s trying to make. And on that point he’s wrong.

There’s an easy way for companies to pay no federal taxes. Really. Don’t incorporate. Any income the business makes passes directly to owners and they pay taxes on that income like any other income. Problem solved. Companies are people!

So why don’t businesses just do that? Because in the terms that Romney is using, corporations are very much not people. By and large, companies incorporate because it gives the owners protection from liability. If the corporation goes bankrupt, and they owe you money, you can’t go after the money of the owner or owners. Only the assets of the company. Company kills someone? Owners protected. Company poisons a rain forest? Owners protected.

One of core reasons for corporations to exist is that they abstract the institution from the people who own it. It’s also one of the core reasons they are taxed separately. If the business itself is liable for debts, not the owners, the same must be true of taxes as they are essentially a form of debt.

In a manner of speaking, those separate (some would say double) taxes are the price you pay to be shielded from the liabilities of your company. And obviously the price is so low that pretty much every big company becomes a corporation.

So here’s the insidious heart of this so called “conservative” notion: owners of businesses should get all of the income of a business (and only pay capital gains tax on it), but none of the liabilities of the business (which should be spread out over all the people it harmed). In a term I’m sure you’re all familiar with from the collapse of 08, they want privatized profits, and socialized losses.

Corporations aren’t people. They are tools we provide the rich so they don’t bear the liability for the sociopathic actions of their creations. That tool is extremely valuable, and if anything, the public should be charging a lot more for it. Think about that. Corporations can effectively cause limitless damage with the only liability being the company’s assets.

If Romney or any other republicans want to do away with corporate taxes, I have a proposal.

No more corporate tax. But no more free limited liability for corporations. Limited liability becomes a cap and trade system. Only 250 companies are allowed limited liability. How much do you think those vouchers would sell for?

Now tell me that corporations pay too much in taxes.

I have been reluctant to do so, primarily because my vision of what the system will be, is much more compelling than what it currently is.

But in the spirit of continuous iteration, here we go.

My smart home setup allows for automation and remote operation of a handful of lights and my AC units. I also have a couple of cameras. That’s the very short version. The longer version requires precious precious context.

Context

I have a biggish house, and it’s a sort of frankenstein amalgamation of a 1950s track home, a sloppy 2000s addition and a nice helping of real-estate buy-and-flip McMansion renovation. In the process of becoming what it is today, a lot of very strange decisions were made that wouldn’t make sense in a modern large home built in one go.

So light switches are in very weird places, newer AC units are pushing lots of air into a ducting system designed in the 50s. Outside lighting and power is almost non-existent despite having an outdoor pool and grill, etc.

So the main goal of my smart home project was to compensate for some of the weirdness of this hodgepodge of choices, and as time has passed, to provide some nice conveniences that make houses more livable. I can also capture and analyze information about the system to my dorky heart’s content.

An auspicious origin

What kicked all this off was stupid school kids stealing a package off our porch. It was returned later, opened, with no explanation. Not long after, someone tried to open the front door to our house shortly after I left. Thankfully the door was locked, and once they noticed Kelli was home (through the door glass) they ran.

“Fuck that noise” I thought to myself. It’s time for cameras. Cameras that can be accessed remotely and can trigger alerts. My camera setup demands a post in and of itself, but suffice it to say, I Macgyvered up something that didn’t look terrible and roughly did what I wanted.

But the cameras needed light at night because they didn’t have IR, and IR cameras suck. Thankfully we have porch lights, so problem solved. But I always forgot to turn them on at night, or off in the morning. So for a long while I just left them on all the time. But eventually my very slight case of OCD would not stand for this solution. What is this? The dark ages? Technology shall come to my rescue. I’d been reading about smart homes for over a decade. Surely this stuff has been figured out.

To the internet!

You can buy timers out the wazoo. But most of them only work on plugin devices, not anything hard wired to power.

You can buy photocell gadgets that plug into the light socket and can tell if it’s daylight or not and switch the lights accordingly. They don’t work. Light comes on, “hey it’s daylight!, I’m going to switch off the light! Oh hey, it got dark, it’s nighttime. I’m going to turn on the light.” Repeat. They get a little dirty, they don’t work. They point the wrong direction by 2 degrees, they don’t work. People on the internet will say that you can make them work if you just figure out the magic juju that prevents the light from the fixture hitting the photocell. These people are liars.

You can replace fixtures with motion detectors that randomly click your lights on and off every time they see a bug. Those are awesome. Those don’t piss of the neighbors. I wouldn’t know, because it’s not like my neighbor has one. One that randomly pumps 2000 lumens into my bedroom windows at all hours of the night for no reason. One that would mysteriously attract small high velocity rocks if it weren’t for the existence of blackout blinds and plantation shutters.

If you want a solution to this that doesn’t suck, you need to buy a wired light switch with a relatively smart timer like this. Or you can start wading into the world of remotely controlled switches and let a computer decide when to turn on the light.

The Great Divide

This is a pretty big line to cross. There’s a lot of crappy, twitchy, mostly-works solutions you can patch together on an ad hoc basis in your home. Per-device light sensors, motion detectors, timers, etc. Most are incredibly dumb, only trigger on one variable, and have pretty lousy reliability. They are also very close in price to smart home equivalents.

If you want anything beyond bare minimum functionality, you’re going to need to bring a computer into the mix. That can be anything from a micro-controller actually built into a switch, to a fully dedicated home control machine.

There are a lot of different kinds of solutions out there, and 3-4 really strong modern competitors in today’s market. All have strengths and weaknesses. I ended up choosing Insteon solutions controlled by Indigo 5. I’ll go into more detail about why in later posts, but the bottom line is – what modules are available, how often are products and software updated, how reliable are they, and what can I do with them?

What do I do with them?

So here’s what you’ve been waiting for. What does my smart home actually do that my dumb home didn’t?

1. Porch light comes on relative to actual sunup/sundown times at my location – i.e. it changes automatically throughout the year. Sconce lights on the exterior of the garage are soon to follow.
2. Laundry room lights come on when you open the door and turns off automatically. The lights witch was installed behind the door, so it’s hard to reach without closing the door. Now you can walk in with a basket of laundry and not have to fumble around in the dark.
3. A floor lamp in my office turns on when I enter and turns off automatically. The only switched light in the room is the ceiling fan. The fan and its light are independently controlled by an RF remote that is hard to find and operate in the dark. When the lights are turned on, the CFLs take a long time to warm up, so if you’re just running in to grab something off your desk, you’ll be doing it in the dark, or wandering over to the floor lamp in the dark to turn it on. No more.
4. Both AC units in the house are controlled by my computer. Expensive programmable thermostats only allow 4 temperature settings per day. Under computer control you can set as many as you want. You can also control the thermostats from any device with a web browser. You can also capture and report out what temps were in the house during the day, and how long the AC ran. You can turn on the AC automatically if you come home early. You can have your computer monitor outdoor temps, and adjust the AC accordingly, etc.
5. Lots of house lights are now under remote control. That means I can have a single button turn off every light in the house (that’s currently controlled) when I head to bed. One of the things we do very often is switch between the overhead lights in the living room, and a floor lamp. Because we use CFLs we can’t use a dimmer for our overhead lights. So switching is now a one button activity you can do from the couch. If that sounds lazy, ask yourself why you don’t get up to change channels on your TV/Cable box, or to adjust the volume on your stereo.
6. Security cams trigger on motion and capture footage remotely. I can tie these into the smart home system, but I haven’t yet. Dumb video motion detection is really really bad, so it’s fine to capture a lot of false positives for later review, but it’s not okay to turn on a bunch of lights and play an alert. There is a really fancy and expensive piece of software called VitaminD that does detection of people, but it’s not really a real time monitoring solution. OpenCV is now including a pedestrian detector, so I’m harassing the maker of my security cam software to include it.

What’s next?

1. A lot more light switches. Our bedroom is a prime choice as this is another place with light switches placed behind the door. But there are hallway lights, a few more patio light locations, fans, etc.
2. Pool pump. It’s currently on an old mechanical timer, and I’d really like to have automatic seasonal adjustment. I could also have my computer monitor the weather for storms and have it kick the pump on for a few extra hours to clean out the crap that’s inevitably deposited in the pool.
3. Garage door opener and door locks It would be nice to be able to remotely lock and unlock doors and open or close the garage. They can also trigger entry/exit scripts. i.e. when we’ve both left in the morning, make sure all the doors are locked and all the lights are out. When we come home, turn on hallway and living room lights and unlock the garage entry door to the house. The automated unlocking would of course have some more conditional logic to make sure it’s actually us coming home.
4. Occupancy detection weirdly enough, this remains a really hard thing to get right. You can detect people in the house pretty easily, but room occupancy is a lot harder. You can manage it if somewhat imperfectly through motion detectors and a counting script, but it gets hairy pretty quickly. Active RFID would be the real way to fly, but it’s really expensive and just not worth it at this point. I’m not sure I care enough about this to make it work with today’s technology, but this really can enable some really cool stuff. Things like music and video following you around the house automatically. Eventually I think the only viable solution will be something like a wireless, fisheye Kinect embedded in the ceiling of every room that’s watching both in visible and IR light.
5. AV integration. This isn’t on the immediate list, it’s more of a nice to have eventually thing. Apple’s remote.app along with airport expresses already does a pretty good job of getting audio where I want it. Harmony remotes also do a credible job of controlling multiple devices in rooms with TVs. But there’s a lot of allure to remote devices like the iPod touch controlling everything.

Caveats

While this is a topic worthy of its own blog post, it should be noted that this stuff isn’t exactly easy to set up. You have to have a basic, but working understanding of home electrical wiring, and relatively decent computer chops. It really really helps if you can program in python or applescript. You can go really far down the dork-well if you know how to design circuits and program ICs.

There’s a reason that installers charge a LOT of money to build and program smart homes. There’s a reason they get a lot of money to maintain and expand systems. Your choices in vendors can have a huge impact. The lifetimes of homes are much greater than the lifetimes of particular technologies. Also, making this stuff work right is sort of a weird combination of skills; part handyman, part electrician, part computer programmer. Its much more accessible than it was 10 years ago, but it’s still not something to be entered into casually.

Yesterday at roughly 3pm I posted a twoot about doing linear regressions and becoming a stats nerd.

This morning, I am informed via e-mail that I have a new follower.

Now one must note that I do not run a cult of personality. I do not get random followers who I don’t already know. So my first assumption is that these followers are always spam.

In the early days of twitter, you would get tons of followers simply because people believed it was like the early days of the web. The more outgoing and incoming links you have, the more relevant and plugged in you are.

But very shortly after, the spammers marched in to piss on everyone’s cornflakes. You started getting followers every day. Twitter was very sluggish to respond, so I took my account private because it was the only way to prevent these assholes from showing up in your followers list.

Recently I opened it up again, and things have changed.

Still spam, but definitely more interesting spam.

Like the SEO link-farmers that have fucked up your google search results, twitter spammers are now employing some tricks to fool spam algorithms. They are using keywords to populate their tweets, using a combination of retweets and simple copy and pasting.

They almost all employ a woman’s name along with a pretty, but not model-hot picture of a woman for the profile. Apparently because guys are stupid.

once every twenty or so tweets, you’ll get a link to the real thing they’re trying to advertise, which apparently is almost always —– wait for it —— software for spamming twitter.

Apparently they’re taking whatever keyword they’re using for aggregating content, and also using it to send follow requests to people who are using it in their tweets. In this case “stats”.

Twitter really needs to allow you the ability to have public tweets and let people “follow” them, while at the same time requiring your permission to have them actually show up as an official follower.

Or they need to introduce a google+ type feature where you have circles. One would be “People who actually care about what I’m typing here” and another would be “random fuckwads who are almost certainly spammers”.

But the block and report mechanism is a joke.

Can you no longer select any network speakers? You click on them and then they immediately deselect?

Yeah me too.

Go to network settings, whatever interface you’re using. Click on advanced. For the “Configure IPv6″ pulldown, select Off.

You’re back to streaming dubstep throughout your house. Mazel tov.

Nic recently wrote a post about productivity, and ultimately about Zen. But since he hates the common folk cluttering up his beautiful content, I thought I’d chuck a few thoughts down here because it’s something I think about too.

In Nic’s post he hit on an important fact:

As D. T. Suzuki shows, Zen is simple. It’s also frustratingly difficult, but it’s simple.

This is a statement that applies to a lot of human behavior. There’s a reason for this: almost all human behavior is complex but arises out of only a handful of simple instructions. The complexity comes when our core instructions interact with an almost unlimited number of variables in our environment.

Productivity is simple, but very difficult. There are a handful of core talents for remaining productive, but applying them in every possible situation gets very difficult very fast. And we are simple monkeys.

So here’s where we come to the core of human action and decision making:

• Humans have limited time in a day/week/month/life
• Humans have very limited attention and memory
• Humans have limited amounts of energy to invest in their actions before they need to rest/recharge

Unfortunately: * Humans are bad at monitoring, estimating, and managing all of the above. * There are and always will be more things competing for our resources than we have resources to give.

Productivity at its heart is about nothing more than deciding what actions are worth taking and then focusing our time, attention and energy on taking those actions while avoiding those things that would compete for that same time/attention/energy.

The reason there’s 10 million words out there around productivity is that we all suck at something called “executive function”. Our brains have evolved in a very different world than the one we now live in, and we’re sort of gluing all this stuff together as we go. Once you get enough things competing for your time/energy/attention, your brain won’t be able to cope anymore and then the anxiety will kick in.

There are a lot of good resources for how to tackle this, and I’ll probably put together another post about this soon. But right now where I’m currently thinking is: What kinds of actions really deserve our attention? How do our decisions about which actions to take help us feel better about our lives and what we’ve accomplished.

Nic noted that a lot of productivity resources are really veiled ADD coping strategies, and I partially agree. I think a bigger trend is that people are asking “How can I get myself to reliably do things I really don’t care about and don’t want to do?”

Most “knowledge workers” live in environments where the line between what I care about and what my boss cares about has to be constantly evaluated, where my list of actions to consider is only partially under my control, and where the signals of importance, urgency and relevance are almost always missing. This is a bad place to be, and I definitely don’t have it figured out, but I’ll share some of my reading and thinking on this in the aforementioned post.

Just a note on Musashi and letting your fighting stance be your everyday stance: I personally don’t think there’s a “correct” way. Musashi tapped into a very real brain thing which is: it’s very difficult and time consuming to overcome sub-conscious and entrenched decision making processes that happen lower down in our brain. Our “thinking” brain is very under powered, and practice pushes more and more action down into the fast hardware of the brain. Musashi is saying: build and bring what you are. Don’t try to be one thing in one context and another thing in another context because it’s untenable. That’s why everyone says “find the system that works for you”. Trying to adopt a new system of managing information that doesn’t jive with your current process is very likely doomed to failure. You can do it, but it will take a lot of work, and the system itself will become another competitor for your time/energy/attention. A thing to look for is: does this make what I’m currently doing easier, or is it asking me to do it differently. You can adopt “easier”, you’ll fight “different”.

Addendum:

Caring for a baby, a 2 year old and a 4 year old all at the same time provides a stark object lesson on the limitations of attention and energy.