The Brooks Review

Year: 2018

  • Snack Pick of the Week: 12/31/18

    This week brings us a new year and there’s only one way you should be ushering in a new year with your snacks. That’s by eating Entenmann’s Softees donuts, the variety pack which you buy for the cinnamon sugar donuts, but suffer through eating the others.

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  • Sleeping Away From Devices, An Experiment

    At the end of October, I started a little experiment. I stopped sleeping with my electronic devices in the same room as me. Specifically, that means my iPhone, and iPad(s). There’s a lot of research/studies/hypotheses around the impact devices have on our health, but there is one thing I believe in all those: the blue light from the devices is terrible for you at night.

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  • Targeted Advertising Is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World

    Dr. Nathalie Maréchal in a very damning essay on targeted advertising has this brutal quote:

    “That’s all ‘AI’ and ‘machine learning’ is for these companies: getting better at guessing what ads to show you,” (Tim) Libert said. “Every tiny bit of data increases the chances they show the ‘right’ ad so they never stop, they never sleep, and they never respect your privacy—every single day everybody at Google collectively works to one purpose: getting the percentage of ‘right’ ads shown slightly higher.”

    You could add Facebook to Google there too. And one more brutal quote:

    This logic of “engagement” is motivated by the twin needs to collect more data and show more ads, and manifests itself in algorithms that value popularity over quality. In less than 20 years, Silicon Valley has replaced editorial judgment with mathematical measures of popularity, destabilized the democratic systems of checks and balances by hobbling the Fourth Estate, and hammered nail after nail into the coffin of privacy.

    Having read this, I’m working on a site redesign which will remove custom fonts, which I think is the last bit I can ditch to making this site as free from, tracking as possible.

  • Best of 2018

    I reviewed a lot of products this year, and one thing I am always sensitive to is not leading people on a never ending chase towards ‘new and shiny’ for no reason other than it is ‘new and shiny.’ It’s the reason I try to keep my “best page” (for members) up to date: so that members always have a sense of what I find to be the best, no matter what I may be using/reviewing/writing about at any given time. To wrap up 2018, here’s a look back at the items I think were the best new items of the year, as well as other notables which fall into the best.

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  • Snack Pick of the Week — 12/24/18

    Shortbread, specifically my grandfathers. Unfortunately I am not going to share his recipe, but I will give away one tip in it “butter, lots and lots of butter”. Nothing says the holidays to me like good shortbread cookies.

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  • Why a passcode is better than biometric access

    This article actually prompted me to change to passwords in many places where I used biometric access before.

  • Leadership is about coaching

    Michael Bungay Stanier:

    Coaching is an essential leadership behavior. Curiosity is the driving force in being more coach-like. Questions fuel curiosity.

    Be sure not to read ‘leadership’ as ‘management’. They are not the same. Most managers aren’t leaders. This lack of curiosity Stanier talks about is a dead giveaway as to which type of manager, your manager is.

  • Burnout and Shorter Work Weeks

    Emma Thomason:

    A recent survey of 3,000 employees in eight countries including the United States, Britain and Germany found that nearly half thought they could easily finish their tasks in five hours a day if they did not have interruptions, but many are exceeding 40 hours a week anyway – with the United States leading the way, where 49 percent said they worked overtime.

    She also mentions Japan encouraging 4-day work week schemes, which is huge. Reminds me of something my wife was telling me the other day “productivity as a measurement for human work is pretty bullshit”.

  • Zuckerberg Lie Files

    Kieren McCarthy:

    By any measure, Facebook as an organization has knowingly, willingly, purposefully, and repeatedly lied. And two reports this week demonstrate that the depth of its lying was even worse than we previously imagined.

  • Microsoft was the real MVP

    It’s hard to argue with Raymond Wong, about how Microsoft really crushed it this year. They quietly ,add great stuff, reminded me a bit of Apple ten years ago.

    I had to chuckle at this line too:

    The Windows company started by Bill Gates and mismanaged by Steve Ballmer, has flourished under CEO Satya Nadella after he took over in 2014.

  • We’ve Got the Screen Time Debate All Wrong. Let’s Fix It

    Great read, and really shows how little we know about this.

  • Amazon error allowed Alexa user to eavesdrop on another home

    Arno Schuetze:

    On the recordings, a man and a female companion could be overheard in his home and the magazine was able to identify and contact him through the recorded information, according to the report.

    That’s a pretty big “human error”. I’m so glad I don’t have one of these eavesdropping devices in my home.

  • Here’s How Your Apps Reveal Personal Information To Facebook

    My personal favorite part, is the part where this still surprises anyone. Second only to the part that people still use this shit.

  • Snack Pick of the Week: 12/17/18

    The snack pick for this week is an all time favorite of mine, Marie Biscuits, the round delicious tea time biscuits you always find in places you duck into in order to kill time. They are delicious, and of course you can snag them on Amazon.

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  • Tom Bihn’s Shadow Guide

    Note: Tom Bihn sent me this bag for the purposes of this review.

    Some time ago Tom Bihn released the Guide’s Pack, which looked like an old school hiking backpack, but with some modern treatments. The limiting factor with that pack, is that despite being quite good, it is far more at home in the woods than in the airport or city. That’s where this Shadow Guide comes in, the same basic design, but rethought to work better as a city and travel backpack.

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  • Insisting on family friendly

    I’m worried about Apple’s stance that their ecosystems must be pure and free from debauchery, remaining family friendly at all times. Or to put it another way, free from pornography and swearing.This isn’t a straightforward thing, and it’s not clear what is good or bad for society as a whole, though I would argue that Apple’s approach of random censorship is more *bad* than good. And at best, absurdly hypocritical.

    ## Apple’s Current Stance and what we know as why

    Generally speaking, iOS users today are restricted as follows:

    – no pornography based apps
    – sexual ‘wellness’ apps are fine, but hindered in what they show. For example: you could get away with depictions by way of illustration, but not out right photography of them.
    – there amazingly does exist a plethora of ‘sexy’ games, but most seem to be benign truth or dare style text based games.
    – iOS autocorrect will not allow you to swear easily, you have to jump through many hoops.
    – any app that allows easy access to adult content, porn, is likely not to survive long, if at all. Unless it’s very popular.

    We know about the why for some of this:

    – [here’s info autocorrect and swearing](https://bgr.com/2018/11/07/iphone-keyboard-autocorrect-problems-swear-words/)
    – [here’s a peek into banning pornography on iPhone](https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/08/steve-jobs-on-why-the-iphone-doesnt-allow-unsigned-apps-they-dont-want-a-porn-store/)

    It’s all what you would expect. There’s too great a risk for unintended consequences with autocorrect working with curse words, and Apple generally feels pornography is a slippery slope which is not manageable for them. Which is fair, until you realize the complete shit that makes it into the App Store already then your like, wut.

    But these two rather simple decisions have quite a ripple effect on our lives as a whole.

    ## Swearing

    There’s something innocuous feeling in Apple’s refusals to acknowledge curse words. At first glance this seems rather obvious, it would be too easy for a kid talking about a duck, to send a message that says fuck. I am going to go out on a limb and say that a machine learning based autocorrect system will quickly learn that fuck is far more common than people talking about ducks. Which is perhaps why it is so ducking annoying that iOS doesn’t make cursing easy.

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  • The Unwearable Lightness of Being: My Week Without a Smartwatch

    Lauren Goode:

    At the same time, the value of an activity tracker isn’t always proportionate to the burden of one. They all have these damn proprietary chargers, and you have to charge them all the time, and for what? So they can count steps? The more I thought about it, the more I needed a break from wearing a wrist Tamagotchi. Be gone, smartwatch, I thought.

    Then I started to really miss it.

    My take away is that Goode likes smart watches but has no clue why. Would be interesting to me to see if replacing the smart watch with a dumb watch would garner the same affection.

  • Every moment of every day, mobile phone apps collect detailed location data.

    That’s a way higher price than any monetary expense of paying for the app.

  • I used all the best stuff for a week and it nearly broke me

    Speaking of the best. This was great.

  • The best doesn’t exist. A psychologist explains why we can’t stop searching.

    Rachel Sugar:

    We have this sense that there is an objective best, and in virtually no area of life is that true. It’s not even that, “Well, there’s the best for me, and then there’s the best for you.” It isn’t even clear that there is a best for me. There’s a whole set of things that are probably more or less equivalent.

    This whole article is clearly written by someone who is fine settling for good enough.