The New Luddites on the Apple Wallet

Posted on 2021-06-23 by jcs

As I wrote yesterday, Apple is rolling out several enhancements to Apple Wallet. That represents technological progress so of course the new Luddites have taken offense and have rushed to publish articles denouncing it. The problem is that it’s hard to criticize things that make your life easier and that are useful to and depended on by many people so the new Luddites have to make up problems with digital wallets. Their conclusion: Apple Wallet is too useful.

I’ve written before about some of the problems with putting all your documents and keys on your phone and why I don’t think they represent serious issues for me. Of course, people have different habits and needs so let’s look at what the new Luddites are saying. First up is Andrew Couts writing for Gizmodo. He says It’s About to Really, Really Suck to Lose Your iPhone. Of course, it always sucks when you lose your phone but now it’s worse because the new Apple Wallet will let you store your house and car keys in it as well as your credit cards.

The thing is, nothing’s changed. You can already open your car or house door with your phone. The only thing that’s different is now the keys can be stored in the wallet rather than being standalone apps.

Couts’ main fear is losing his iPhone and therefore, he says, becoming stranded because he has no phone, car keys, credit cards, or even house keys. But that’s not the inevitable consequence he makes it out to be. First of all, you can always carry a $20 bill in your pocket or hidden in your car. Doing that reduces the problem to losing your keys, which is easier to do than losing your phone.

But there’s an easier solution. Wear an Apple Watch. It can, right now today, do all the things that Apple Wallet can. It can store your credit cards, let you in your house, and open/start your car. It’s also almost impossible to lose. If you have one, you have a backup to your phone. If you’re depending on your physical wallet and keys, you have no backup.

Brett Molina also has an entry in the New Luddite Sweepstakes. His fear is not getting stranded but exposing the information in his wallet to thieves or hackers. In USA Today, he writes, iOS 15: Why I’ll keep my driver’s license in my wallet and not my iPhone. He doesn’t want to risk letting his private information get compromised. That argument is beyond silly. First of all, he has to lose his iPhone, which is much less likely than losing his wallet. Then the thief or hacker has to break into the phone to get at the data which is famously difficult. If he loses his physical wallet all the thief has to do is take out the cards and read them.

Both of these articles are, I suppose, click bait but they’re still annoying. Rather than address whatever problems the new technology may have they make up silly new Luddite objections to it. Sadly, it’s what we’ve come to expect from the Tech Press and why it’s not worth paying any attention to them.

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The Digital Wallet Moves Forward

Posted on 2021-06-22 by jcs

Those of you who have been hanging around for a while know of my obsession with digital wallets and reducing my everyday carry to just my iPhone. There’s been a lot of progress since I first wrote about it. Almost every place that accepts credit cards now also accepts Apple Pay and its Android equivalent. The only notable holdout is Walmart and as I wrote previously, I’ve substituted Amazon for Walmart so I no longer care.

The state of Florida is promising to roll out digital licenses sometime this year and when that happens I will no longer have a need to carry a wallet. That leaves keys. Smartphone mediated electronic door locks have long been available so that part was easy. All that’s left is car keys.

Uptake of keyless vehicle entry and startup among automobile manufacturers has been slow—it sometimes feels like we’d still be starting our cars by cranking a handle on the front if it was up to them—but there has been movement: more manufacturers are starting to offer keyless options. Meanwhile, Apple has stepped up and is implementing enhancements to Apple wallet to hold both digital IDs, such as licenses, and digital keys for cars and houses. There’s more at the link so take a look if you’re interested in the digital lifestyle.

The ability to carry all your documents and keys on your smartphone and to go truly walletless is upon us. If you’ve got a car such as the Tesla, the era of going walletless is already here. As soon as the rest of the car manufacturers get on board, it will be here for everyone.

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Demonstration of Dired Video

Posted on 2021-06-21 by jcs

Like most Emacs users, I consider Dired the way of dealing with file operations. That means a lot coming from me because I’m an old timer used to dealing with such things from the command line. But even after a lifetime of learning and using the command line utilities, I find that Dired is simply better and easier. And I don’t have to leave Emacs.

Over at the Emacs Elements YouTube Channel, there’s a video demonstration of configuring and using Dired. As the video shows, there is a lot of configuration possible with Dired. You can hide files, turn off confirmation prompts, change the format of the output, and many other things. With a configuration adopted to your workflow, your Dired operations can have significantly less friction.

The other point of the video is how powerful Dired is. You can perform almost any file operation with a simple, short command. In most cases, you don’t have to remember any syntax because Dired prompts you for any information it needs. To me, one of the most magical of Dired tricks is that you can make the buffer writable and any changes you make will be applied to the files affected.

Even if you’re an experienced Dired user, the video may teach you something new. It’s just short of 18 minutes so plan accordingly.

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YASnippet in Eshell

Posted on 2021-06-20 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez has a great, quick tip for Eshell users. Actually, it’s a good tip for any shell you’re using in Emacs. Ramírez starts by revisiting level 4 from Vivek Haldar’s classic post on the levels of Emacs proficiency. I wrote about my own experience with his post here.

Level 4 is about discovering the shell within Emacs. In Ramírez’s case that shell is Eshell but he had trouble remembering the syntax for some of the commands that he used infrequently such as for. Then he remembered that Eshell is just another Emacs buffer so he could use YASnippets to complete the commands for him. Thus for the for he simply typed for and Tab to get a for template that he could fill in by tabbing through the fields.

Ramírez has a link to a YASnippet tutorial if you aren’t already familiar with writing the templates. As I said, the same idea would work with other shells because they, too, are just Emacs buffers. It’s a small thing but it can eliminate one piece of annoying friction in your workflow.

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Universities Continue Their Slow Motion Suicide

Posted on 2021-06-19 by jcs

Universities seem intent on forsaking their traditional values with the expected results. Enrollments are down significantly and an increasing number of parents are performing cost/benefit analyses that don’t bode well for an improvement of those enrollment figures. One would think, therefore, that universities would avoid associating themselves with sketchy enterprises that are universally reviled among right thinking people of every political persuasion.

But no. A consortium of topnotch universities has come up with the perfect plan to deal with declining revenues: they’ve decided to become patent trolls. They’re going to pool their (mostly) low quality patents and seek licensing fees from businesses that they believe might be infringing.

The majority of these universities (there’s a list at the link) are public institutions and all of them are receiving grants that fund their research from pubic monies. One would think, therefore, that the results of their research would belong to the public and be available to all to use. But not according to the universities that want us to pay for the research and then pay again to use it.

When the history of the university system’s failure is written, this sorry chapter will certainly be featured. Rather than focusing on their traditional roles of education and expanding knowledge, they decided to exploit those who are trying to earn a living and providing employment to others. This won’t stop them of course. They’ll continue on their self destructive path until an annoyed pubic has laws passed putting their research results in the public domain. When that happens, their wails of anguish and outrage will be ignored by the public they were so happy to exploit.

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Red Meat Friday: Emacs or VS Code

Posted on 2021-06-18 by jcs

For those of you wondering if you should adopt Emacs or VS Code, here’s your answer. You’re welcome.

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Adtech and FLoC

Posted on 2021-06-17 by jcs

It won’t come as a surprise to anyone with the slightest bit of skepticism or, indeed, two brain cells to rub together that Google’s replacement for cookies, FLoC, is a privacy nightmare. Google, of course, is touting the system as a privacy respecting alternative to third party cookies but privacy experts are warning that they have the potential to be a worse privacy problem than cookies.

It didn’t take long for proof of these assertions to emerge. According this Digiday article, adtech firms are already testing ways of linking of FLoC indentifiers to personal data they already hold. If you’re surprised, you shouldn’t be. This is what adtech does: they’ll exploit any opening in their insatiable quest for data about us. There’s no piece of information they consider too small to exploit. Their goal is to build a complete profile of every person using the Internet.

It won’t—believe me—end with using that information to target ads at you. The iron law of data acquisition guarantees that it will be abused. That will probably start with law enforcement demanding access but sooner or later people like divorce lawyers will also want to get at it. Everything about you will be available for anyone who can convince a court that they have a need for it.

If you’re interested in how FLoC can be exploited, here’s a useful privacy analysis of FLoC that describes how it can be exploited to link the FLoC code back to individuals. Be sure to give it a read before you accept Google’s assurances about FLoC respecting your privacy. In the meantime, Amazon is reportedly blocking FLoC on most of their sites. That’s for competitive advantage, of course, but is nevertheless good to see.

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Configuring Emacs as a Go IDE

Posted on 2021-06-16 by jcs

Bhavin Gandhi has a post that may be useful to those who want to use Emacs for Go programming. It’s easy to get things like syntax highlighting but for the full IDE experience you need the Go LSP server. Gandhi’s post, How to setup Emacs LSP Mode for Go, explains how to set Emacs up as an IDE for Go.

It is not, of course, all that difficult but as usual with such things it can be fiddly. Gandhi’s post is a nice go by to get up and running is short order. Once you have things working, you can address optimizing your configuration to suit your preferred workflow.

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Working From Home and Bosses

Posted on 2021-06-15 by jcs

Ed Zitron has a long Substack essay on why bosses hate remote work. The article, The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses’ Brains, posits that it’s all about control but probably not for the reasons you’d expect. The proximate fear is that without being watched, employees may work less than the 8 hours they’re being paid for or even work on side gigs.

Of course, ROWE is an obviously solution to that so perhaps there’s something else going on. Zitron’s essay is an extended rant on what that something else is. The crux of his argument is that middle management is essentially a useless position conceived as a way of compensating longtime employees without actually paying them more. Rather, the compensation is being able to boss people around and exercise pseudo-ownership of their souls. Meanwhile, their actual productive work is negligible consisting mostly of holding time wasting meetings. The problem with remote work is that it makes all this obvious.

Most of you will probably reject his arguments as too outré but recognize that they hold a kernel of truth: managerial dislike of remote work is founded on a fear of loss of control and perhaps even a fear for their jobs.

On the other side of the argument, a recent study from the University of Chicago that compares worker productivity before and after WFH found that productivity remained about the same but that workers spent more time working. On the one hand that can be taken as evidence that the fear of workers goofing off is ill founded but there’s still the worry about loss of control. It will be interesting to see how things shake out.

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More on the Why of Emacs

Posted on 2021-06-14 by jcs

Jeremy Friesen has a bit more to say on why he uses Emacs. Last time we stopped by his blog, he explained how he molds Emacs to enhance his blogging workflow. This time he’s answering a question on the Emacs/reddit as to whether there’s any reason to prefer Emacs to a “modern looking” IDE such as VS Code. I generally stop reading when I see terms like “modern looking” but Friesen is more patient than I and posted a thoughtful response that explained why he thought there was.

Friesen’s reasons boil down to synergy. He says he uses Emacs for 3 main purposes:

  • Coding
  • Blogging
  • Note Taking

and observes that when he implements something—a new function or key binding, say—to improve one area, he automatically gets gains in the other areas as well.

He expands on his reply a bit in his blog post. Using Emacs means fewer context switches and the opportunity to master Emacs. He’s found that the lessons he’s learned extend beyond Emacs. He sums it up by saying that Emacs helps him get better at dealing with digital information.

I don’t know for sure but I’d guess that most people who have taken the time to really learn Emacs have experienced that. I know that Emacs has made me really good at wrangling text and therefore with dealing with digital data in general.

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