Space Glasses
Wearable Technology, for your face
Once computers got small enough that “wearable technology” was a thing we could talk about with a straight face, glasses were an obvious form factor. Eye glasses were already the world’s oldest wearable technology! But glasses are tricky. For starters, they’re small. But also, they already work great at what they do, a nearly peerless piece of accessibility technology. They last for years, work on all kinds of faces, work in essentially any environment you can think of, and can seamlessly treat any number of conditions simultaneously. It’s not immediately obvious what value there is in adding electricity and computers. My glasses already work great, why should I need to charge them, exactly? Plus, if you need glasses you need them. I can drive home if my watch crashes, I can’t go anywhere if my glasses break.
There’s a bit in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which has sort of lost it’s context now, about how goofy digital watches were, considering they didn’t do anything that clockwork watches couldn’t do except “need new batteries.” Digital Glasses have that problem, but more so.
So instead smartphones happened, and then smart watches.
But still, any number of companies have tried to sell you a computer you strap to your head and over your eyes. Mostly, these exist on an axis between 3d headsets, a form factor that mostly froze somewhere around the VirtualBoy in the early 90s, and the Google Glass, which sounded amazing if you never saw or wore one. Now it looks like Apple is ”finally” going to lift the curtain on their version of a VR/AR glasses headset.
A couple of lifetimes ago, I worked with smart glasses. Specifically, I was on the team that shipped Level Smart Glasses, along with a bunch of much more interesting stuff that was never released. For a while, I was a major insurance company’s “Lead Engineer for Smart Glasses”. (“Hey, what can I tell ya? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Truthfully, I don’t think about those guys that much since all that stuff went down.”)
I spent a lot of time thinking about what a computer inside your glasses could do. The terminology slid around a lot. “Smart Glasses.” “Wearable Tech.” “Digital Eyewear.” “Smart Systems.” “VR headsets.” “Reality Goggles.”
I needed a name that encompassed the whole universe of head-mounted wearable computing devices. I called them Space Glasses. Internally at least, the name stuck.
Let me tell you about Space Glasses.
Let’s Recap
Traditionally the have been two approaches to a head-mounted computer.
First, you have the VR Headset. This broke out into the mainstream in the early 90s with products like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, but also all those “VR movies” (Johnny Mnemonic, Disclosure, Lawnmower Man, Virtuosity,) and a whole host of game initiatives lost to time. (Who else remembers System Shock had a VR mode? Or Magic Carpet?)
On the other hand, you have the Heads Up Display, which from a pop-culture perspective goes back to mid 80s movies like Terminator or Robocop, and maybe all the way back to Razor Molly in Neuromancer. These stayed fictional while the VR goggles thrashed around. And then Google Glass happened.
Google Glass was a fantastic pitch followed up by a genuinely terrible product. I was at CES a couple years back, and there’s an entire cottage industry of people trying to ship a product that matches the original marketing for Glass.
Glass managed to be the best and worst thing that could have happened to the the industry. It demonstrated that such a thing was possible, but did it in a way that massively repulsed most of the population.
My glass story goes like this: I was at a convention somewhere in the greater Silicon Valley area, probably the late lamented O’Reilly Velocity. I’m getting coffee before the keynote. It’s the usual scrum of folks milling around a convention center lobby, up too early, making small talk with strangers. And there’s the guy. Very valley software engineer type, pasty, button down shirt. Bit big, a real husky guy. And he’s staring at me. Right at me, eyes drilling in. He’s got this look. This look.. I have no idea who he is, I look up, make eye contact. He keeps starting with that expression. And for a split second, I think, “Well, huh, I guess I’m about to get into a fistfight at a convention.” Because everything about this guy’s expression says he’s about to take a swing. Then he reaches up and taps his google glasses. And I realize that he had no idea I was there, he was reading email. And thats when I knew that product was doomed. Because pulling out your phone and starting at it serves an incredibly valuable social indicator that you’re using a device.. With a seamless heads-up display like glass, there was no way to communicate when you were reading twitter as opposed to starting down a stranger.
Which is a big part of why everyone wearing them became glassholes.
Plus, you looked like a massive, unredeemable dork. To mis-quote a former boss of mine, no produc tis going to work if it’ll make it harder for you to get laid, and Glass was the most effective form of birth control known to lifekind.
Underreported between the nuclear-level dorkiness and the massive privacy concerns was the fact that Glass was incredibly uncomfortable to wear for more than a couple of minutes at a time.
Despite that, the original Glass pitch is compelling, and there’s clearly a desire to find an incarnation of the idea that doesn’t set off the social immune system.
Glass and Better-made VirtualBoy’s aren’t the only ways to go, though.
Spectrums of Possibilities
There are a lot of ways to mount a microprocessor to someone’s head. I thought of all the existing space glasses form factors operating on two main orthogonal axes, or spectrums. I’ll spare you the 2x2 consultant chart, and just describe them:
- With a screen, or without. There are plenty of other sensors or ways to share information with the wearer, but “does it have a screen or heads-up-display” is a key differentiator.
- All Day wear vs Single Task wear. Do you wear them all the time, like prescription spectacles, or do you put them on for a specific time and reason, like sunglasses?
There are also two lesser dimensions I mention for completeness:
- Headset-style design vs “normal” glasses design. This is more a factor of the current state of miniaturization than a real design choice. Big headsets are big only because they can’t fit all that in a package that looks like a Ray-bans wayfarer. Yet. You can bet the second that the PS VR can look like the Blues Brother’s sunglasses, they will.
- VR vs AR. If you have a screen, does the picture replace the real world completely, or merge with it? While this is a pretty major difference now—think VR headset vs Google glass—like the above this is clearly a quirk of an immature technology. It wont take long before any mature product can do both, and swap between them seamlessly.
What do we use them for, though?
This is all well and good, but what are the use cases, really?
On the “no screen” side of the house: not much. Those are, fundamentally, regular “dumb” non-electric glasses. Head mounted sensors are intersting, but not interesting enough to remember to charge another device on their own. People did some interesting things using sound instead of vision (Bose, for example,) but ultimately, the correct form factor for an audio augmented reality device are AirPods.
Head-mounted sensors, on their own, are interesting. You get very different, and much cleaner, data than from a watch or a phone in a pocket, mostly because you have a couple million years of biological stabilization working for you, instead of against you. Plus, they’re open to the air, they have the same “sight-lines” as the operator, and they have direct skin contact.
But not interesting enough to get someone to plug their glasses in every night.
With a screen, then, or some kind of heads-up display.
For all-day wear, it’s hard to imagine something compelling enough to be successful. Folks who need prescriptions have already hired their glasses to do something very specific, and folks who don’t need corrective eyewear will, rounding to the nearest significant digit, never wear spectacles all day if they don’t need to.
Some kind of head’s up display is, again, sort of interesting, but does anyone really want their number of unread emails hovering in their peripheral vision at all times?
I saw a very cool demo once where the goggles used the video camera, some face recognition technology, and a database to essentially overlay people’s business cards—their name & title—under their faces. “Great for people who can’t remember names!” And, like, that’s a cool demo, and great you could pull that off, but buddy, I think you might be mistaking your own social anxiety for a product market just a little bit. And man, if you think you’re awkward at social events when you can’t remember someone’s name, I hate to break it to you, but reading their name off your cyber goggles is not going to help things.
For task-based wear, the obvious use remains games. Games, and game-like “experiences”, see what this couch looks like in your own living room, and the like. There’s some interesting cases around 3d design, being able to interact with an object under design as if it was really there.
So, essentially, we’ve landed on VR goggles, which have been sputtering right on the edge of success for close to 30 years now, assuming we only start counting with the Virtual Boy.
There’s currently at least three flavors of game-focused headwear—Meta’s Quest (the artist formerly known as the Oculus,) Sony’s Playstation VR, and Valve’s index. Nearby, you have things like Microsoft’s HoloLens and MagicLeap which are the same thing but “For Business”, and another host of similar devices I can’t think of. (Google Cardboard! Nintendo Labo VR!)
But, fundamentally, these are all the same—strap some screens directly to your eyes and complete a task.
And, that’s a pretty decent model! VR googles are fun, certainly in short bursts. Superhot VR is a great game!
Let’s briefly recap the still-unsolved challenges.
First, they’re all heavy, uncomfortable, and expensive. These are the sort of problems that Moore’s Law and Efficiency of Scale will solve assuming people keep pouring money in, so can largely write those off.
Second, you look like a dork when you wear these. In addition to having half a robot face, reacting to things no one else can see looks deeply, deeply silly. There is no less-attractive person than a person playing a VR game.
Which brings us to the third, and hardest problem: VR goggles as they exist today are fundamentally isolating.
An insufficiently acknowledged truth is that at their core, computers and their derivatives are fundamentally social devices. Despite the pop-culture archetype of the lone hacker, people are constantly waving people over to look at what’s on their screen, passing their phone around, trading the controller back and forth. Consoles games might be “single player,” but they’re rarely played by one person.
VR goggles deeply break this. You can’t drop in and look over someone’s shoulder when they have the headwear, easily pass the controller back and forth, have a casual game night.
Four friends on a couch playing split screen Mario Kart is a very, very different game than four friends each with a headset strapped over their eyes.
Not an unsolvable set of problems, but space glasses that don’t solve for these will never break out past a niche market.
AR helps this a lot. The most compelling use for AR to date is still Pokemon Go, using the phone’s camera to show Pokemon out in the real world. Pokemon Go was a deeply social activity when it was a its peak, nearly sidestepping all the isolating qualities AV/VR tends to have.
Where do they fit?
At this point, it’s probably worth stepping back and looking at a slightly bigger picture. What role do space glasses fill, or fill better that the other computing technology we have?
Everyone likes to compare the introduction of new products to the the smartphone, but that isn’t a terribly useful comparison; the big breakthrough there was to realize that it was possible to demote “making phone calls” to an app instead of a whole device, and then make a computer with that app on it small enough to hold in your hand.
The watch is a better example. Wristwatches are, fundamentally, information radiators. Classic clockwork based watches radiated a small set of information all the time. The breakthrough was to take that idea and run with it, and use the smart part of smart watches to radiate more and different kinds of information. Then, as a bonus, pack some extra human-facing sensors in there. Largely, anything that tried to expand the watch past an information radiator has not gone so well, but adding new kinds of information has.
What about glasses then? Regular eye glasses, help you see things you couldn’t otherwise see. In the case of prescription glasses, they bring things into focus. Sunglasses help you see things in other environments. Successful smart glasses will take this and run with it, adding more and different things you can see.
Grasping towards Conclusions
Which all (conveniently) leads us to what I think is the best theoretical model for space glasses—Tony Stark’s sunglasses.
They essentially solve for all of the above problems. They look good—ostentatious but not unattractive. It’s obvious when he’s using them. While on, they offer the wearer an unobstructed view of the world with a detailed display overlayed. Voice controlled.
And, most critically, they’re presented as an interface to a “larger” computer somewhere else—in the cloud, or back at HQ. They’re a terminal. They don’t replace the computer, they replace the monitor.
And that’s where we sit today. Some expensive game hardware, and a bunch of other startups and prototypes. What’s next?
Space Glasses, Apple Style
What, then, about Apple?
From the rumor mill, it seems clear that they had multiple form factors in play over the course of their headset project, they seem to have settled on the larger VR goggles/headset style that most everyone else has also landed on.
It also seems clear that this has been in the works for a while, with various hints and seemingly imminent announcements. Personally, I was convinced that this was going to be announced in 2020, and there was a bunch of talks at WWDC that year that seemed to have an empty space where “and you can do this on the goggles!” was supposed to go.
And of course that tracks with the rumor that that Apple was all in on a VR-headset, which then got shot by Jonny Ive and they pivoted to AR. Which jives with the fact that Apple made a big developer play into AR/VR back in 2017, and then just kinda... let it sit. And now Ive is out and they seem to be back to a headset?
What will they be able to do?
Famously, Apple also never tells people what's coming... but they do often send signals out to the developer community so they can get ready ahead of time. (The definitive example was the year they rolled out the ability for iOS apps to support multiple screen sizes 6 months before they shipped a second size of phone.)
So. Some signals from over the last couple of years that seem to be hinting at what their space glasses can do. (In the parlance of our times, it's time for some Apple glasses kremlinology game theory!)
ArKit's location detection. AR Kit can now use a combination of the camera, apple maps data, and the iPad's LIDAR to get a crazy accurate physical location in real space. There's no reason to get hyper-accurate device location for an iPad. But for a head-mounted display, with a HUD...?
Not to mention some very accurate people Occlusion & Detection in AR video.
RealityKit, meanwhile, has some insane AR composition tools, which also leverage the LIDAR camera from the iPad, and can render essentially photo-real objects ito the "real world”.
Meanwhile, some really interesting features on the AirPods, like spatial audio in AirPods Pro. Spacial has been out for a while now, and seems like the sort of thing you try once and then gorfet about? A cool demo. But, it seems like a way better idea if when you turn your head, you can also see what’s making the sounds?
Opening up the AirPods API: "AirPods Pro Motion API provides developers with access to orientation, user acceleration, and rotational rates for AirPods Pro — ideal for fitness apps, games, and more." Did anyone make apps for AirPods? But as a basic API for head-tracking?
Widgets! A few versions back, Apple rolled a way to do Konfabulator-esque (or, if you rather, Android-style) widgets for the iOS home screen. There's some strong indications that these came out of the Apple watch team (codenamed chrono, built around SwiftUI,) and may have been intended as a framework for custom watch faces. But! A lightweight way to take a slice of an app and "project" a minimal UI as part of a larger screen? That's perfect for a glasses-based HUD. I can easily see allowing iOS widgets to run on the glasses with no extra modifications on top of what the develoer had to do to get them running on the home screen. Day 1 of the product and you have a whole app store full of ready-to-go HUD components.
App Clips! On the one hand, it's "QR codes, but by Apple!" On the other hand, what we have here is a way to load up an entire app experience by just looking at a picture. Seems invaluable for a HUD+camera form factor? Especially a headset with a strong AR component—looking at elements in AR space download new features?
Hand and pose tracking. Part of greater ML/Vision frameworks, they rolled out crazy-accurate hand tracking, using their on-device ML. Check out the demo at 6:40 in this developer talk
Which is pretty cool on it's own except they ALSO rolled out:
Handwriting detection. Scribble is the new-and-improved iPad+pencil handwriting detector, and there's some room for a whole bunch of Newton jokes here. But mixed with the hand tracking? That's a terribly compelling interaction paradigm for a HUD-based device. Just write in the air in front of you, the space glasses turn that into text on the fly.
And related, iOS 14 added ML detection and real time translation of sign language. (?!)
Finally, there's a strong case to be made that the visual overhaul they gave MacOS 11 and iOS14 is about making it more "AR-friendly”, which would be right about the last time the goggles were rumored to be close to shipping.
In short, this points to a device:
- Extremely aware of it's location in physical space, more so than just GPS, via both LIDAR and vision processing.
- Able to project UI from phone apps onto a HUD.
- Able to download new apps by looking at a visual code.
- Hand tracking and handwriting recognition as a primary input paradigm.
- Spacial audio.
- Able to render near-photoreal "things" onto a HUD blended with their environment.
- Able to do real-time translation of languages, including sign language.
From a developer story, this seems likely to operate like the watch was at first. Tethered to a phone, which drives most of the processing power and projects the UI elements on to the glasses screen.
What are they For?
What they can do is all well and good, but what’s the pitch? Those are all features, or parts of features. Speeds and Feeds, which isn’t Apple’s style.What will Apple say they’re for?
The Modern-era (Post-Next) Apple doesn’t ship anything without a story. Which is good, more companies should spend the effort to build a story about why you need this, what this new thing is for, how it fits into your life. What problems you have this solves.
The iPod was “carry all your music with you all the time”.
The iPhone was the classic “three devices” in one.
The iPod Touch struggled with “the iPhone, but without a phone!”, but landed on “the thing you buy your kids to play games before you’re willing to buy them their own phone.”
The iPad was “your phone, but bigger!”
The Watch halfheartedly tried to sell itself as an enhanced communication device (remember the heartbeat thing?) before realizing it was a fitness device.
AirPods were “how great would it be if your earbuds didn’t have wires? Also, check out this background noise reduction.”
The HomePod is “a speaker you can yell requests at.”
So, what’s will the Space Glasses be?
For anyone else, the obvious play would be games, but games just aren’t a thing Apple is willing to be good at. There’s pretty much a straight line from letting Halo, made by Mac developers, become a huge hit as an XBOX exclusive to this story from Panic’s Cabel Sasser about why Untitled Goose Game is on every platform except the Mac App Store.
This is not unlike their failures to get their pro audio/video apps out into the Hollywood ecosystem. Both require a level of coöperation with other companies that Apple has never been willing to do.
Presumably, they’ll announce some VR games to go on the Apple Glasses. The No Mans Sky team is strongly hinting they’ll be there, so, okay? That’s a great game, but a popular VR-compatible game from six years ago is table stakes. Everyone else already has that. What’s new?
They’ve never treated games as a primary feature of a new platform. Games are always a “oh yeah, them too” feature.
What, then?
I suspect they’ll center around “Experiences”. VR/AR environments. Attend a live concert like you’re really there! Music is the one media type Apple is really, really good at, so I expect them to lean heavily into that. VR combined with AirPods-style spacial audio could be compelling? (This would be easier to believe if they were announcing the goggles at their music event in September instead of WWDC.)
Presumably this will have a heavily social component as well—attend concerts with your family from out of town. Hang out in cyberspace! Explore the Pyramids with your friends!
There’s probably also going to be a remote-but-together shared workspace thing. Do your zoom meetings in VR instead of starting at the Brady Bunch credits on your laptop.
There’s probably also going to be a whole “exciting new worlds of productivity” where basic desktop use gets translated to VR/AR. Application windows floating in air around your monitor! Model 3d objects with your hands over your desk!
Like the touch bar before it, what’s really going to be interesting here is what 1st party apps gets headset support on day one. What’s the big demo from the built-in apps? Presumably, Final Cut gets a way to edit 360 video in 360, but what else? Can I spread my desktop throughout the volume of my office? Can I write an email by waving my hands in empty space?
Anyway.
The whole time I was being paid to think about Space Glasses, Apple was the Big Wave. The Oncoming Storm. We knew they were going to release something, and if anyone could make it work, it would be them. I spent hours on hours trying to guess what they would do, so we could either get out ahead or get out of the way.
I’m so looking forward to finding out what they were really building all that time.
Pluralistic vs Looters
Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic is always worth reading, but today’s is a real barn burner, tearing into the Private Equity looters who seem intent on hollowing out civilization:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/
I’m going to die mad that we all decided it was okay for Toys ‘R Us to get murdered in broad daylight. We don’t actually have to give up everything to make a couple rich people richer.
The Richmond Way
At some point towards the end of the summer of 2020, right about the time it was becoming clear that the worst summer of our lives was about to become an even worse winter, I started hearing about this show. It didn’t sound like my kind of thing. Sports comedy? Starring the guy who always played jerks on SNL? And it’s on that new Apple streaming thing? Wrote it off initially, “huh, lotta tv these days!”
But then I kept hearing about it. Hearing about it from the sort of people who normally don’t like that sort of show, both on-line and in real life, “trust me, you have to watch this.” Okay, maybe?
And then, right in the middle of that I bought a new iPhone, which came with the free trial of AppleTV+. Okay! Let’s check it out.
And then we watched the whole first season of Ted Lasso in one sitting.
It was stupendous! A fun premise—American College Football coach hired to coach a British Football team—fun characters, good writing. “Lightweight?“ Sure, it was a sitcom after all, but consistently managed to punch above its weight class thanks to universally good performances, tight writing, and an ability to constantly surprise through pushing against the standard sitcom tropes by always choosing to be kind and sincere instead of mean and sarcastic.
But also, a perfect match of a great show hitting at just the right time. Surrounded by a world that seemed intent to surrender to anger and fear, here was a show about solving problems with kindness, a show where the main character’s super power is radical empathy. This perfect bubble of hope and escapism in the middle of everything burning down. A salve, permission to imagine a better way.
It’s been interesting to want the reactions to the show change. The Disaster of the Twenties continues to roll on, but by summer of ’21 it had settled into something more akin to Gibson’s Jackpot, state of being instead of an imminent disaster, notwithstanding what the delta variant was doing to our fall plans.
The show came back, and there was a sense that its moment had passed. We had vaccines, COVID wasn’t on the same uncontrolled rampage, the election was over. We weren’t quite as desperate for something to take the edge of we had been the year before.
Popular shows always get some backlash when they come back, but the responses to Ted Lasso were vicious even by those standards.
All those people who wouldn’t normally watch a show about a kind guy being kind, those same people who kept recommending it as “normally I wouldn’t like something like this but you have to watch it,” all railed about how bad it was now, it had lost it’s way, it was predictable, the characters were boring, there was no conflict. All without any sort of self-recognition that maybe the show was exactly the same, and they had changed, or rather, changed back.
The show skipped summer ’22, and then just wrapped up it’s third and final season here at the start of summer ’23.
For the record, I though the end was perfect. The resolution wasn’t hugely surprising; the show was fundamentally about kindness being the answer, so if you stopped and asked at the start of the season “what’s the kindest thing the show could do for each character,” you’d probably be pretty close to the actual end. It was beautiful, tying up most of the character’s stories, and leaving just a few open-ended to let you wonder what happened next.
There’s a great beat in the middle of the season where recurring antagonist-turned-ally Trent Crim figures out what’s been happening this whole time, looks the camera dead in the eye and delivers the basic thesis of the show.
Ted Lasso himself always functioned more like a character in the vein of Mary Poppins than a standard sitcom hero; he arrived when the other characters needed him most, and once they had learned what they needed to, his work was done, he moved on, and the curtains closed since the story was about the other people learning from Ted. As the title character says towards the end, “it wasn’t about me, it never was.”
Even more so than last time, the criticism was… strange. A centerpiece of the blowback this year was that the show “lacked conflict”, which was a) literally wrong, but also b) tremendously missing the point. This was the resolution of three seasons of people becoming emotionally healthier and learning from Ted to also solve problems with kindness; the whole point was that now, there was still conflict, and it was still sometimes hard, but everyone was trying to be kind. It’s nearly unprecedented for an American show to resolve a conflict by having both parties realizing they’d rather be friends than rivals, it was clear that for a chunk of the audience that simply didn’t register as drama.
It’s telling, I think, that the other big show ending at the same time was HBOs’ “Mean People being Mean to each other, and then all Losing,” which was praised by all the same people that had turned on Ted Lasso’s “Kind People being Kind to each other, and all Winning.”
It’s easy to over-signify things, and I’ll avoid the easy generalizations here around the state of the world, but I’ll just say I think we’d be a lot better off if everyone who didn’t like the second and third seasons of Ted Lasso as much as the first would all take a moment and consider some reasons why that might be. Spoiler: the show didn’t get worse. Try thinking of what the kindest reason might be.
Happy Towel Day!
“Listen, it’s a tough universe! Theres all sorts of people and things trying to do you, kill you, rip you off, everything! If you’re going to survive out there, you’ve really got to know where your towel is.”
—Ford Prefect
SCTV’s “Death of a Salesman”
One of the things I loved about SCTV was their willingness to take a weird premise and just let it play out. There might be other sketch shows that would have thought of “Death of a Salesman” starring Ricardo Montalban and DeForest Kelly, but none of them would let it spool out, getting stranger and stranger, for over 7 minutes:
When I was in college there was a local channel that would play the full 90 minute SCTV episodes at 1 in the morning, which was the perfect environment for the bizarre dreamlogic fueling that show. Absolutly brilliant.
And as a chaser, here’s Spock and McCoy in “Check Please:
Strike Season
All of us here at Icecano are, of course, in full support of the Writer’s Guild strike, and now it’s starting to look like there’s a good chance the Actors are going join them. Good! Shut the whole industry down until you all get what you deserve.
From the outside, this strike certainly seems to have an existential, “final duel on the lava planet” vibe to it that the last writer’s strike didn’t.
As a member of an industry that is not organized—and really needs to be—I’m watching this situation with a mixture of admiration and envy. It’s a joy to see what mature labor power looks like. We could all have this, if we wanted!
Here’s hoping the WGA—and the rest of “hollywood”— manages to hold out for as long as they need to get everything they deserve, keep the financialization gig-economy wolves out, and perserve their art form as a viable career.
And maybe their success will help convince the rest of us to organize our industries too.
Drobo Ragnarök
As per Ars Technica, Drobo is making it official:
I was a very happy customer of one Drobo, and a very grouchy customer of a second.
To recap, Drobo was a “storage robot”, a device that had all the advantages of a RAID array without needing much in the way of management. The headline feature was that you could mix-and-match drive sizes and types. It took the form of a box of hard drives plugged into the back of your computer, and it handled the rest. It was perfect if you wanted expandable storage with a RAID-like defense against individual drives failing, but also didn’t want to tinker with configuring things yourself.
I bought my first one in 2014, and it was exactly what I needed at the time. I was digitizing a bunch of old VHS video, and needed some expandable storage that wasn’t susceptible to individual spinning drives going bad on me. The fact that I could mix-and-match drive sizes was a nice bonus, but the best feature was that I didn’t have to configure anything; it would “just work.” I was in that prosumer mid-point where I could have figured all that out, but was willing to pay more so that I could spend that time with my kids instead.
The usual complaints about Drobo were that there were expensive—true, and slow. The model I bought connected over thunderbolt and supported an SSD cache, so generally I didn’t notice a speed difference between the Drobo and the internal “fusion drive” of the iMac it was connected to. The fan was surprisingly loud, but not distractingly so.
The big disadvantage was that it wasn’t actually RAID, it was something proprietary they called “BeyondRAID.” The upshot being that the only thing that could read a drive from a Drobo array was another Drobo.
This worried me before buying the first one, and we started joking about the coming “Drobo Ragnarök” where all Drobos would die and no new ones would be available, and our data would be lost.
“Ragnarök! RAID is not a backup!” we laughed.
April of 2019, I got a partial Ragnarök. My Drobo died hard. Of course, I had almost everything on it backed up, except the project I was in the middle of. I then proceeded to have the worst customer service experience of my entire life, which ended up with me buying a new Drobo at full price in what was essentially a hostage ransom and swearing to never spend money with them again.
There was an amazing moment where I realized that not only were they not going to help me troubleshoot—I remain convinced it was the power supply—nor were they going to repair or replace my dead unit, they weren’t even going to offer me the “store manager discount” on a new model. Overnight, I went from the guy who would enthusiastically recommend Drobos to looking people dead in the eye and saying “do not buy one under any circumstances.”
The replacement arrived and fortunately loaded the old disk array fine. The first thing I did once it woke all the way up was to set up two different complete backups of the data. Never again!
That second Drobo is humming behind me as I write this. The new one is definitely louder. I’ve glaring at it almost daily the last 4 years thinking I needed to replace it, but on the other hand, I spent a lot of money on that sucker and as long as it’s backed up I might as well get some use out of it…
I may have bought the last Drobo in the country; somewhere around the start of the twenties they stopped being available, and the company limped along promising that any day now they’d come back into stock.
The supply chain disruption from the Disaster of the Twenties was an easy excuse to cover the fact that the niche they’d carved out no longer existed. Most people were using cloud storage for everything, and anyone who actually needed a big pile of local files needed them in a form that wasn’t held hostage by one company’s increasingly flaky hardware.
It’s too bad—a hassle-free, flexible, “it just works” RAID-like solution has a market. Drobo found it, but couldn’t keep it.
Drobo Ragnarök.
No Contact Non Tracing
Woke up on Friday to a notification that California had quietly shut down their participation in the Apple-Google smartphone-based contact tracing system.
Had to imagine a better microcosm of the fractal nature of the Disaster of the Twenties: faced with a massive epistemological, social, and political catastrophe, Silicon Valley declares that they have a technological solution! Which is then rendered inert by a different subset of epistemological, social, and political issues.
Other than consuming battery in the background, I never got any exposure warnings from that system. Did anyone? Based on tne near-total lack of coverage of the shutdown over the weekend, I’m guessing the oly value this thing provided was some self-congratulatory press releases a few years ago. What a waste.
It’s Not Just Computer Magazines Ending
Bruce Sterling has a line, which I now can’t find the source for, that goes something like “the frontier of the 21st century is the wreckage of the unsustainable.”
I’ve been meaning to link to Harry McCracken’s The End of Computer Magazines in America, like the rest of the tech blogosphere (see also Gruber, Snell, Tsai). Like everyone else, maybe note that this is part of the larger trend of advertising-supported magazines going extinct—magazines, remember them?—and then maybe do a wistful Gen-X anecdote about how The Kids These Days™️ just aren’t into computers for their own sake anymore.
(And McCracken’s piece is worth reading if for no reason than for his description of what a “real magazine” was like at their peak—there are things that look and act like magazines, but none of them have those kinds of resources.)
But then Buzzfeed laid off the news arm, Vice looks like it’s about to implode and the WGA went on strike. And suddenly it’s less about “oh man, I miss Dr. Dobbs journal too” and instead the entire post-dot-com media landscape is running aground at once.
And these events, like Toy ‘R Us going under, or newspapers withering away, tend to produce a lot of sad looks and thinkpieces about how that’s too bad, but times have moved on, and Adan’s Smith’s Invisible Hand has just smothered Bed Bath and Beyond with a decorative pillow, and there’s no stopping progress!
But there’s a key point that I think often gets hand-waved away that John Rogers perfectly highlights in this tweet chain, which I’ll quote here:
2) There’s an unfortunate tendency in modern American thought to write about economies, or markets, like they’re the weather. Like they’re natural phenomena, you know, “ market forces”, the invisible hand, etc, shit just happens, can’t be helped!
3) Bullshit. Economies, markets, are products of human thought. They are shaped by the rules we place upon them and distorted by the will of those who operate within them.
And that’s the point. This didn’t all happen because of the weather; we don’t have magazines anymore and TV writers are broke because of choices people made.
People chose to use the disruption of the web, and craigslist, and google adwords to pivot away from sustainability and towards a growth-at-al-costs model, hoping the slurry of cheap, low-quality content would somehow convert a sea of distracted eyeballs into a viable business model.
People chose to gut whole industries to make rich people richer.
People chose to try to turn TV writers into gig workers.
For decades now, the financialization vultures have been hollowing out our whole civilization, chasing “growth” and sucking the wealth into fewer and fewer hands. This didn’t happen by accident, or just because “progress”, people chose to do this, and the rest of us chose to let it happen.
The web and everything that came with it is usually described in terms of Disruption—throwing existing, stogy, companies into disarray, and letting new, nimble replacements an opportunity to slide in and serve those customers better. And that’s true! But also true, and something we’ve not done a good job recognizing, is that any wide scale disruption allows the scam artists and the vampires in to get their clutches into a new set of enterprises.
Looking over the wreckage of the 21st century, we all have to start doing a better job telling the difference between “disruptors” and “parasites”.
Theres another line I can’t source that goes something like “the internet turns everyone into musicians.” But—it didn’t have to!
There’s the usual chorus of “Get a real job!” anytime someone asks for a bigger slice of the existing pie. More often than not, this seems to come from the deep antipathy in American culture towards any job that’s in any way creative; any job that someone might actually enjoy. But always left unsaid is what jobs count as real?
But here’s the thing—we get to choose which jobs are real. What if we chose the jobs we wanted to do?
The unsustainable is wrecking out. We can chose what comes next.
“Deserve Better” how, exactly?
Humane, the secretive tech startup full of interesting ex-Apple people has started pulling the curtain back on whatever it is they’ve been building. The rumor mill has always swirled around them, they’re supposedly building some flavor of “AI-powered” wearable that’s intended as the next jump after smartphones. Gruber at DaringFireball has a nice writeup on the latest reveals at https://daringfireball.net/2023/04/if_you_come_at_the_king.
And good luck to them! The tech industry can always use more big swings instead of another VC-funded arbitrage/gig-economy middle-man app, and they’re certainly staffed with folks that would have a take on “here’s what I’d do next time.”
Gruber also links to this tweet from Chaudhri, Humane’s co-founder: https://twitter.com/imranchaudhri/status/1624041258778763265. To save you a click, Chaudhri retweets another tweet that has side-by-side pictures of the NBA game where LeBron James broke the scoring record and the 1998 game-winning shot by Michael Jordan. The key difference being, of course, that in the newer shot everyone in the stands has their phone out taking a picture, and in the older shot there are no cameras of any kind. And Chaudhri captions this with “we all deserve better.”.
And this is just the strangest possible take. There are plenty of critiques of both smart phones and the way society has reorganized around then, but “everyone always has a professional grade camera on them” is as close to an unambiguous net positive as has emerged from the post–iPhone world.
Deserve better, in what way, exactly?
If everyone was checking work email and missing the shot, that’d be one thing. But we all deserve better than… democratizing pro-grade photography? What?
As techno-cultural critiques go, “People shouldn’t take photos of places they go,” is somewhere between Grandpa Simpson yelling at clouds and just flatly declaring smart phones to be a moral evil, with a vague whiff of “leave the art of photography to your betters.”
Normally, this is the kind of shitposting on twitter you’re roll your eyes and ignore, but this is they guy who founded a company to take a swing at smartphones, so his thoughts on how they fit into the world presumably heavily influence what they’re building?
And weirdly, all this has made me more interested in what they’re building? Because any attempt to build “the thing that comes after the iPhone” would by definition need to start with a critique of what the iPhone and other smartphones do and do not do well. A list of problems to solve, things to get right this time. And never in a million years would it have occurred to me that “people like to take pictures of where they are” is a problem that needed solving.
Is it the same Titan?
I’m kind of fascinated by Big Franchise storytelling? That is, the completely unique set of constraints and opportunities you get when you’re trying to tell a story as part of a continuity thats been going for nearly 60 years. The third season of Picard has a fantastic example of building on top of what came before while using it to make your story better, despite some sharp edges.
Picard 3 is effectively a new show—and unlike the previous seasons is much more Star Fleet–focused. (And is acting like it might be a backdoor pilot for a follow-up.) Most of the action takes place out in space on a star ship. Given all that, it realy needs its own signature Hero ship.
What ship do you use? For starters, it can’t really be the Enterprise, partly because that’ll swamp the storytelling, partly because the story works better if the ship isn’t from the Star Fleet major leagues, but mostly because I’m convinced they’re saving the Enterprise for the grand finale. (As I write this, there are still two episodes to go, so we’ll find out if I’m correctly interpreting the guns they hung over the mantlepiece.)
But, even thought it can’t be the Enterprise specifically, it should be something “like” the Enterprise. That is, the classic Star Trek look: round saucer, secondary hull, glowing dish on the front, warp drives up above. Like SNW before, this season has a real back-to-the-classics approach, and the ship design should reflect that.
But emotionally, the ship should reinforce the state we find the TNG characters in at the start of the show: retired, out to pasture, star fleet has moved on. Picard and Riker are both well past the point where they have a ship or can get one easily. The ship should reinforce their sense of displacement at the start of the story.
If it can’t be the Big E, is there something else lying around in the toybox we can use? Fortunately, there is! The USS Titan.
For those of you just joining us, Riker was promoted to command of the Titan in 2002’s aggressively mediocre Star Trek Nemesis. In keeping with that movie’s lack of basic competence, Riker finally gets a ship of his own, and the audience never gets to see it, the movie keeping it off screen the entire time.
The ship did get a design later, however, with a design sourced from a a fan contest. The winning design was a Reliant-style “light cruiser” reconfiguration of the Enterprise-E’s parts, same saucer, engines below, rollbar with torpedos above. (As an aside, I always thought the design was fine, but thought it was slightly insulting that Riker didn’t deserve a “real” Enterprise-style “heavy cruiser”.)
This design got used in various spin-off material for 2 decades—novel covers, calendars, and so on—until it made the jump to the screen at the end of the first season of Lower Decks.
Emotionally, an upgraded Tian is perfect. Riker has just enough pull as the former captain with this one specific ship to get on board, and let him and Picard try to pull off a heist through sheer charisma. But! The new captain, Riker’s replacement, doesn’t like them, and the ship is remodeled and different. It’s barely the ship Riker knew, and a thing that he thought was his one connection back to the old days ends up highlighting his disassociation even further. It’s Kirk unable to find the turbolift in TMP, but better written.
And from the dialog in the show it’s clearly supposed to be the same ship. Riker’s music was still in the library, and Shaw, the new captain, knows how to pull off some tricks with the 20-year old warp engines.
The problem, however, is that the new Titan and the old one look absolutely nothing alike, and there’s no sane theory that could explain how the one could be rebuilt into the other and have anything orignal left.
So: creatively and emotionally, it’s the right thing to do, but derailed by a 2 decade old design that was never in live action. So, what can you do? Well…
Decide to stay consistant with the old look and launch your new show with a ship that won a contest for paperback covers. Clearly not going to happen. Regardless of the pros or cons of the design, this is a new show and calls for a new ship.
Hope no one notices, and retcon the old design and pretend the Titan always looked like this. That’s just rude.
Sigh deeply and use a different ship. Sure, but… What? Make a up a new one? There’s suddenly a lot of time you have to spend rebuilding the emotional beats to a ship no one in the audience has ever heard of. Worf’s old Bird of Prey from DS9? Even worse. The Defiant? Talk about extra baggage we don’t want to spend time on!
Invoke the Mystery Science Theature mantra of “It’s just a show, you should really just relax,” and then split the difference between being a refit and new build by calling it a refit in dialog and then slapping a -A on the registry number, and hand-waving past the details.
Given the options, number Four is clearly the right choice, here.
Personally, I think it’s a pretty elegant way to use the existing material to deepen the new stuff without letting it drag the new show down. I mean, it’s pretty silly to imagine what it would take to rebuild the old shape into the new one and have it be worth the effort, but where else can you juice an emotional beat by dropping a reference to a movie from 20 years ago, which was itself a follow-up to a show that went off the air nearly a decade before that?
Not everything should be a sprawling multi-decade multi-format multi-media franchise, but I’m enjoying the way people are finding new ways to tell stories using them.
(And, as a final note here, I’ll add that Picard 3 also has what I think is the single best use of “hey, you know we have footage of these same people playing these same characters from 36 years ago, can we use that somehow?”)
Wilhem!
Audio preservationist Craig Smith has restored and uploaded a whole host of classic sound effect recordings to freesound.org: Preserving the Sunset Editorial Sound Effects Library from the USC Archive
Some very cool stuff in here, but the signature item is the complete original ADR session that produced the “Wilhelm Scream”! https://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/675810/
I expect “not an ow!” to land in a couple dozen dance tracks by the end of the summer.
Q1 2023 Links Clearinghouse
Wherein I go through the tabs I’ve left open on my iPhone over the last couple of months.
After Dark Sky shut down, I kicked myself for not taking more screenshots of the App’s gorgeous and thoughtful UI and data visualizations. Fortunatly, someone else thought ahead beter than I did:
https://nightingaledvs.com/dark-sky-weather-data-viz/
Why yes, is IS a dating sim that does your Taxes! “Suitable for singles without dependents”. Incredible.
“The stupidity of AI.” Finally starting to see some blowback on all the VC-fueled AI hype.
“Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland.” Came for the Metaverse shade, stayed for the subtle implications that American suburban life is probably worse.
The thing i am struck by the most from the current “tech stuff”; zuck’s metaverse, everything out of open ai, musk’s twitter, “ai” “art”, etc, etc, is how _artless_ it all is. Just devoid of any sort of taste or creativity, overcooked fast food pretending to be a meal. Plus for that kind of money any of them could have improved the world so much they’d get a holiday named after them, but no.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-meta-horizon-worlds.html
Back in the runup to Star Trek Beyond, Darrich Franich wrote a series at Entertainment Weekly covering all the Trek movies. Probably the best writing on those movies I’ve ever read, the best one might the piece on Insurrection, a very, very silly movie that doesn’t know it:
https://ew.com/article/2016/06/24/star-trek-insurrection-age-hollywood/
Recently discovered this clip of two icons of my childhood colliding: Isaac Asimov on the original (daytime) Letterman show?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=365kJOsFd3w
Finally, XKCD’s Randal Munroe’s grandfathers series of “Disfrustrating Puzzles”:
Break; considered confusing
Currently filled with joy and a deep sense of fellowship about this toot from James Thompson:
To be clear: Thompson is a long-time mac indy mac developer, author of Pcalc and the much-missed DragThing. He is, without a doubt, a Good Programmer.
I love this toot because it’s such a great example of how we all actually learn things in this craft—we aren’t taught so much as we accrete bit of lore over time. Everthing I took an actual class in was obsolete by the turn of the century, so instead I have a head full of bits of techniques, cool facts, “things that worked that one tine”—lore. We can’t always remember where we picked this stuff up, and often it’s half-remembered, context-free. It’s not funny that he was wrong, it’s amusing that he knew something that didn’t exist. How many cool tricks do I know that don’t exist, I wonder?
Mainly this caught my eye, though, because `break` is a statement I try to avoid as much as possible. Not that break isn’t valid—is is!—but I’ve learned the hard way that if I find myself saying “and now I’ll break out of the loop” (or, lord help me, continue,) I am absolutely about to write a horrible bug. I actually made a bad decision about five decisions back, my flow control is all messed up, and instead of breaking I need to take a deep breath and go for a walk while I think about what the right way to approach the problem was.
This is the flip side to lore—I think we all have areas where we havn’t collected enough lore, and for whatever reason we avoid instinctually so we don’t get ourselves into trouble.
Wild Things at 25
Wild Things turns 25 this week! Let me tell you a story about the best time I ever had in a theatre.
My roommate really wanted to go see Wild Things. “It’s our generation’s Fatal Attraction!” she said. I did not want to go see this movie. Everything about it looked mediocre.
From all the advertising, it looked like it was going to be another piece of mid 90s Sleeze, Sex & Violence thriller bubble, where dangerous women lure unsuspecting men to their doom; the kind of movie you’d rent only if Blockbuster was already out of Fatal Attraction, The Crush, Disclosure, and Basic Instinct.
There was also kind of a mid 90s “we just found about about Carl Hiassen” bubble, which resulted in a bunch of vaguely noir-ish movies set in florida. (See also: Striptease.)
And, who was in it? Matt Dillon, who was mostly “no, not the guy from 90210, the guy from The Outsiders. No, the other one. No, the OTHER one,” four months out from Something About Mary. Neve Campbell, who was still mostly “the girl from Party of Five.” Denise Richards, who was still mostly “the girl from Starship Troopers.” Kevin Bacon? Not a great 90s track record, but sure. Bill Murray, who was still six months away from relighting his career with Rushmore, still in the “funny cameo in Ed Wood” phase.
A cast that looks way better in retrospect than at the time, but in context a sort of vaguely b-list talent in what looked like a vaguely b-list knockoff of a Verhoeven Movie. Everything about it had the quality of a movie everyone knocked out over the summer between “real” projects. Make a couple of bucks, take a nice vacation to Florida. Sure! No judgement! Everyone has bills to pay.
I made this argument. We went to go see the movie opening weekend.
[Spoilers ahoy, I guess?]
And the first 20-30 minutes of the movie play exactly like you expect. Two high school girls, one “rich/hot”, one “poor/goth”. Dorky guidance counselor. Maybe something happens? Maybe consensual, maybe not? Rape accusation. The movie is running the standard playbook. You could basically set your watch by the plot beats you were expecting.
Except.
The whole thing is just a little bit better than it ought to be. The camera work is intertesting. The music by George Clinton is way better than you’d expect, generating this haunting swamp-noir vibe. Bill Murray shows up and demonstrates why he’s months out from a whole second act of his career. All the actors are doing more careful nuanced work than it seems like they ought to be. The whole thing demonstrates a level of care that a schlocky knockoff shouldn’t have.
And then it turns into a totally different movie.
With absolute confidence, the movie trusts the audience has seen all the same movies that it’s seen, and then winks and swerves out into a whole different thing, turning into a twisty, intricately plotted web of quadruple crosses where everyone is up to three more things than you thought they were.
I remember this mounting sense of glee as the movie suddenly wasn’t what I expected, and then kept going, careening into more and more interesting places that I imagined.
This all continues right through the end, when the movie delivers what’s still the best set of post-credit stingers of any movie, putting the whole set of events into new light. It’s phenomenal.
Hands down, the most any movie has ever exceeded my expectations. So much fun to have a movie pretend to be something else in the marketing, and then turn into a different movie.
It doesn’t seem to come up that often; I suspect the marketing worked against it, and has slipped out of memory. An under-appreciated gem from the late 90s. Happy Birthday!
The Prequels, slouching towards respectability
From Polygon today: “The MCU keeps copying the Star Wars prequels”
It’s been interesting to watch recently as the years have started to treat The Phantom Menace well. I’ve seen several pieces now over the last year or two with a favorable view of the prequels—did folks rewatch them for the first time in a decade over lockdown and realize they wern’t as bad as they remembered?
I’d submit George Lucas does the Big Special Effects Jamboree Action Scene better than anyone working today. Even Phantom Menace, probably the worst-received work of his career on release, has a meticulously crafted final three-part action sequence that puts most movies to shame. Always exciting, never confusing; the cuts from place to place are clear, you can tell where people are relative to each other, and every character in the movie gets at least one highlight moment to shine.
After dozens of movies with the same confusing all-computer graphics smash-em-up third act—Marvel and otherwise—it’s worth going back and looking at what the master of the form did, even in his lesser works.
Still Driving, Still Surviving
Drive to Survive is back! Which is great, but I find myself wishing the season started with a longer “previously on” recap. Something on the scale of what they used to do on SOAP.
License failure
There are plenty of examples out there of a large company not understanding the community around an open license, but I’m almost impressed that Hasbro’s OGL shenanigans have managed to basically speedrun the SCO vs Linux case, the creation of the GNU project, and Tivo inspiring the GPLv3, all in, what, 2 weeks?
Windows layer cake
Really enjoyed this rundown of “old” (vestigial) UI elements hiding in back rooms of Windows 11.
Windows is frequently a deeply irritating system to use, but no one else has ever tried to do what they do—support backwards compatability across a family of operating systems effectively forever.
I’d read 10,000 words easy on all of the UI throwbacks listed in that article; I’d love to know how much “old code” is still running in Windows 11 under the covers. Sometimes backwards-compatable “just” means not taking the old stuff out!
I suspect that a lot of “other operating systems” ability to move forward and cut backwards compatibility comes from know that Microsoft is providing air cover for long term support. When you stop to think about it, it’s pretty incredible that software written in the mid 80s for DOS can run basically fine on the new PC I bought in 2019. Unlike, say, the museum of older macs and iPhones keep around.
Mostly, though, i’m just deeply, deeply charmed that moreicons.dll is still shipping on new computers 30 years later.
Wood is a strategy
Fascinating article on trees, plants, and categories. Plants are weird:
https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/