After not switching on my Xbox One for a few months, it wouldn’t connected to my WiFi. It kept saying “Can’t connect to DHCP Server”. Rebooting the router, and forgetting the WiFi network made no difference. In the end, the way to fix it was to go into my router’s network settings, look for the list of devices that had previous connected (and been assigned an IP address), and remove the Xbox from the list. Within minutes, my Xbox was back on the Internet, and downloading updates.
$27.7 billion, or $250,000 per paying user. It’s a testament to good product management that Slack has maintained is simplicity in the face of competition from Microsoft Teams. In my experience, Slack’s simple emulation of traditional IRC encourages real-time collaboration that is great at the time, but not easy to refer back to after the fact. Microsoft Teams on the other hand presents users with the option of adding a subject line to messages, meaning it gets treated more like email, with threads and replies that can be impossible to follow in real-time. This does however make it easier to find what was said later on.
I don’t use CRM Systems on a daily basis, but I have had to work on products that integrate with them. Salesforce is far easier to use and develop for than Microsoft Dynamics, so I think this deal could bode well for Slack users.
It’s crazy to see the British tabloids egging people on in trying and find loopholes in the UK Government’s Coronavirus restrictions. A better headline would have been “Ignore lightweight Agriculture Minister George Eustice, and keep to the spirit of the rules. Viruses don’t care about your intent, technicalities, or what the Government says”. Then again, there’s a reason why I didn’t go into journalism.
Lots of headlines today about a feature called Productivity Score that is part of Microsoft Office 365. The service promises to help “organizations transform how work gets done with insights about how people use Microsoft 365 and the technology experiences that support them.”
While on the face of it, Productivity Score does sound somewhat Orwellian, I think this is down to poor naming. What it really seems to be is a measure of how people use various Microsoft products. If it helps companies measure their ROI on Office 365 and respects privacy, then so be it. While it’s possible some gullible manager somewhere might equate software usage to productivity, I have faith that in most organisations this will not be the prevailing view. Productivity is all about efficiency of work produced, and is something that evening leading economists struggle to grapple with. Anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes in a modern workplace will tell you that simply having conference calls and creating Powerpoint presentations does not equate to being productive. Calls, emails, spreadsheets and whatever else Productivity Score measures are byproducts of productivity, not evidence of it.
In what seems to been an inevitable move in the march of awfulness that is much of the tech industry these days, Spotify has announced that it will be giving artists who pay for the privilege a boost in the algorithm that recommends music to its customers.
For many, especially those who listen to commercial radio, this is probably nothing new. The idea of a record label paying to get their acts in front of more listeners is a pretty standard affair. However, the idea these ads might be sold to customers as a personalised recommendations seems creepy to me. I hope they are clearly labelled as ads, even if the artist having paid for promotion is only one of many inputs into the algorithm that ultimately produces the recommendation.
I never really got on with Spotify’s user interface, but I do use Apple Music due to its Siri and Apple Watch integration. The recommendations seem to be very US centric and can be very hit and miss. I’ve found a couple of new artists via Apple Music, but mostly I find most of my new music via 6 Music. I can’t see Apple selling out like this.
Employees who continue working from home after the pandemic should be taxed for the privilege, with the proceeds used to help lower-paid workers, according to a new report. Economists at Deutsche Bank have proposed making staff pay a 5% tax for each day they choose to work remotely. They argue it would leave the average employee no worse off because of savings made by not commuting and not buying lunch on-the-go and fewer purchases of work clothing. Alternatively, the report suggests the tax could be paid by employers who do not provide their workforce with a permanent desk.
While I agree that there is a desperate need to rebalance the economy and ensure that essential workers who often cannot work from home are compensated in such a way that recognises how utterly essential their work actually is, it does seem somewhat shortsighted to me that you would penalise people for being productive at home while also being kinder to the planet and not commuting. For one, buying fewer clothes is a good thing for the planet, though I think most people will find other excuses to buy new clothes.
Many office workers do not buy expensive takeaway food every day as the article suggests. Anecdotally, when we were at the office, I noticed a lot of my colleagues used to simply bring in last night’s leftovers in for lunch. Those that do buy lunch every day will likely drive demand in local shops and cafes. Even in lockdown, my local village bakery frequently has people queuing out of the door at lunchtime. All of this is to say that such for some, such a tax could make it more expensive to work from home, especially those who drive to work rather than take more expensive public transport. Do we really want people driving to the office just to save money? Let’s hope governments skip past this one, as there are plenty of other ways to increase tax revenue.
This is a fascinating interview with David Heinemeier Hansson, of recent Hey.com fame. He makes the point that when building software, we shouldn’t try to estimate features and then fit them into two week sprints. Instead, it should be possible to determine the value of solving a particular problem and then set time boundaries on solving it. The timeframes needn’t be short two-week sprints as if often the case in scrum, but something more suited to solving the problem in hand, say 6 weeks.
His central theme is that software is more akin to creative projects like books or movies than big engineering projects like building a skyscraper. While I think there are some interesting ideas here, and as a practitioner of Scrum I am also keenly aware of how easy it can be to become dogmatic about the various ceremonies and systems it advocates so much so that you end up becoming less agile.
That said I think shorter iterations are useful when you are unsure of the value of a certain feature. Building the smallest MVP allows you to test the market in order to determine the value. The idea of setting a time budget and giving the team a couple of months to build out a feature without the overhead and bureaucracy that Scrum entails does seem incising however, and may be appropriate in some cases. I will try to keep this in mind as I develop projects in the future.
I try to avoid Twitter or other social media, I’ve come to see it as the equivalent of trashy daytime TV - bad for the mind, and there’s always something much better I could be doing with my time. For many months now I’ve not had any social network apps installed on my phone. I did find however that for Twitter specifically I missed seeing Tweets from a handful of individuals whose posts were more often than not links to intelligent and insightful articles.
To solve this, I’m using a feature of Feedbin - my RSS sync service of choice. Feedbin allows you to include Twitter accounts as part of your RSS feed. This means you don’t have to “follow” the account, you never see how many “likes” or “retweets” a post has, and you can easily read any linked articles alongside other RSS subscriptions. There are no advertisements, no “recommended for you” lists, and best of all, you can’t see any replies either. No snark, no “purity spirals”, no inclination to reply or retweet anything myself. I’ve found that being a passive onlooker instead of an active participant on Twitter drastically reduces its addictiveness.
In the beginning, Samsung TV owners were seeing ads for new streaming content, apps or Samsung products. Owners are now complaining about larger, increasingly obtrusive, and unrelated ads.
This is why my Samsung TV is no longer connected to the Internet. Instead, I use an Apple TV to stream media. If you can’t do that, then I recommend using a Raspberry Pi and installing PiHole to block the ads. Even the cheapest model will run PiHole, and it’s laughably easy to install.
A reminder that you should make sure you have enabled the new ‘Reduce Loud Sounds’ option in both iOS 14 and watchOS 7, which puts a safe limit on headphone volume.
These settings were previous managed in different places within both operating systems and the limit I set in the previous version did not carry over when I upgraded. This is a bit of a worrying slip in QA from Apple, as it could quite easily lead to a potentially ear-damaging situation where someone happily sets their volume to maximum thinking they have a safe limit set, but they in fact do not.
I recommend setting the limit to to the lowest level, 75 dB. Your ears will no doubt have to contend with other shocks throughout the day, so don’t go adding any unnecessary ones. You certainly don’t want to end up with tinnitus like me!
The new setting can be found under Settings → Sounds & Haptics.
Update: Apple have acknowledged the bug described above.
