By Dan Moren

August 31, 2017 5:28 PM PT

The Back Page: Too Many Virtual Assistants

Look, it all started out innocently enough. Apple put this robot voice on my phone, and at first it was fun to ask it questions and get witty answers. Occasionally it was useful for setting a timer or even sending a quick text message.

But this has gotten out of hand.

Okay, I admit it: I laughed, at first, when people warned me of the dangers of intelligent agents listening to and watching everything I said and did. It seemed presposterous that that would ever come back to bite me. After all, these are mere voices in machines, not real intelligences. They were here to make my life easier, better. The idea that they could somehow be bent on my destruction was a thing of fiction.

That is what I thought, anyway. But how wrong I have been proved.

My modest one-bedroom apartment is now overflowing with virtual assistants, to the point where to even speak a single word—nay, even a syllable!—out loud could put me at risk of any number of little cylinders and air-freshener-shaped gadgets lighting up in their sinster fashion and “accidentally” sending an email message to my childhood crush or playing the greatest hits of Michael Bolton throughout the entire house.

I knew I should never have let them watch Westworld.

Please. Send help. I haven’t slept in two weeks, because every time I get in bed, the Philips Hue lights go on full blare and John Philip Sousa marches start playing at volume level 11. Does passing out count as sleeping?

I’m not quite sure how it got so out of control; much of it is a blur. All I wanted was a simple way to play music in the kitchen, and now there’s an Echo, an Echo Show, two Sonos Speakers, a Google Home, and I’ve heard them whispering amongst each other that they might try to order a HomePod when it comes out. I’d stop them, but I’m pretty sure they have access to my credit cards. Mostly I’m worried that they might buy three or four Roombas and try to herd me. The smart locks will not let me out. The TV is playing nothing but episodes of Frasier 24 hours a day.

Friends, there is only so much Kelsey Grammer one man can take. And that number was already very close to zero. I’m not sure how much longer I can hold out. I fear for my very life. Like Icarus, I flew too close to the sun on wings of wax, and now I am paying the pric—what’s that you say? Unplug them?

Huh. I mean. I could. The plug is right there. But wouldn’t that mean, you know, making my own calendar appointments? Or looking up things on the Internet myself? Wouldn’t I have to buy a radio? I…I don’t know. I mean: on the one hand I’ve got murderous intelligences, and on the other…figuring out how many teaspoons are in a quarter cup.

I think I’ll take my chances with the murderous intelligences.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

August 31, 2017 5:23 PM PT

What I Use: The Road Trip Aftermath

So as I wrote about at Six Colors earlier this month, I just spent 11 days on the road with my family, staying in a variety of locations, from hotels to rental condos to an alfalfa field.

Tech gadgetry is, of course, a huge part of my life, and this trip gave me some perspective about how I approach travel tech. I’ve got some observations that might help all of you, not to mention my future self who’s preparing for another one of these trips…

USB block chargers are good. After many years of resisting, I bought an Anker USB charger a few months back. It’s got a nice cord to reach to inconvenient power plug locations in rentals (or even at home; this one lives by my side of the bed when we’re not traveling) and then offers up many USB ports for use charging iPhones, iPads, Kindles, Nintendo Switches, you name it. This was my first time seriously traveling with this accessory, and I loved it.

Long USB cords are good. As I mentioned in my piece on the site, I bought a bunch of six-foot braided nylon Lightning cables a while ago as a way to stop the destruction of Lightning cables in my house by my children, who will always use their devices while tugging on the end of the power cable just for maximum damage. They’ve held up a lot better, and on a trip the extra length is good for those inconveniently placed power outlets, as well.

Long cords on Apple’s power bricks: use them. These days I always travel with at least one Apple iPad charging brick—with the long Apple power cord snapped into it. No, the iPad chargers don’t ship with the long cord, but many Apple laptops have, so you may have one of these floating around your house. All the Apple power plugs are swappable—you can just pop off the plug that’s attached directly to the brick and pop on the longer power cord, and you’ve got even more reach to plug in your Apple Watch or iPhone while keeping it by your bedside.

I’m so glad we have a USB car adapter. We don’t have standard power plugs in our car, but we do have a power port that’s permanently got a two-USB adapter attached to it. That’s all our power for a long car trip, but combined with those long USB cables, we managed to run a whole lot of devices and never run out of power.

Wireless data plans that rate-limit you aren’t great. Not too long ago, we changed our AT&T wireless plan to one of their new “unlimited” plans. Will it surprise you to discover that those scare quotes are there because the plans aren’t really unlimited? After 10GB of use in the billing cycle, all devices are throttled to 128kbps connections for the rest of the month. That’s really slow, and due to the poor connectivity in the places we were staying on our trip, we managed to hit that cap very quickly. In the old days, we would’ve been charged $15 for a small additional pool of data—which would’ve probably cost a whole lot of money.

I’ve since been told by a Twitter follower who works at AT&T that the right thing to do in these circumstances is to call AT&T and ask to be put on a full unlimited plan (which is also not unlimited, it speed-rates you after something like 22GB of data in a month) for the remainder of my billing cycle. I looked online for something like this while we were traveling, and didn’t find it—but I suspect this is one of those things that simply requires a phone call. If I had to do it all over again, I might’ve given a phone call a try—I don’t want the more expensive plan every month, but if we’re going to be traveling for almost two weeks, I’d like to be able to pre-buy more full-speed data.

Still, we managed with slow data. I was able to check Slack and Twitter a little bit—but it was slow. Don’t make me go back to the days of slow Internet on my phone. It’s no good.

Internet in other’s peoples houses is bad. We stayed at two vacation properties rented via the VRBO service, and both boasted Wi-Fi—but the Internet connectivity was lousy at both places. I’m starting to think that my correct vacation strategy should be to call my wireless carrier, get that upgraded data cap for the vacation month, and then not worry about lousy hotel Wi-Fi. See also: John Gruber and XKCD.

Don’t worry, adapters are everywhere. If you left an adapter or cable at home, don’t worry. At a truck stop in middle-of-nowhere Nevada, there were three walls of every conceivable cable and adapter, more than half of them with Lightning plugs on them. Apple’s dominance of the accessory market is pretty amazing — given how many Android phones are out there, the truck stop I stopped at (to buy a USB-A to USB-C cable for my son’s new Nintendo Switch) was dominated by iPhone accessories. Oh, and I bought the cable with Apple Pay.

I may stop travelling with an Apple TV. Given my connectivity woes, I never bothered to hook up the Apple TV I brought in the hopes of watching Netflix or HBO GO from our rentals. Maybe next time I’ll just bring an HDMI cable and a Lightining-to-HDMI adapter to attach to my iPad. Or maybe I won’t bother at all, since my 12.9-inch iPad screen was big enough for at least a two-person “Game of Thrones” viewing party.

Yelp is helpful, but Yelp reviewers are bad. I’ve mocked the reviewers on the book-review site GoodReads before—their reviews are often hilariously focused on the reviewer’s own lives and their descriptions of their own review philosophy, rather than focusing on the books themselves. Look, I’ve been reading and writing reviews for a couple of decades, so I know that it can be a hard job and all that throat-clearing and focus on meta issues happens to every new reviewer. What I hadn’t realized until this trip is that Yelp reviews are just as bad, if not worse. I’m in Salt Lake City looking for a good place to take my family that’s within a couple of miles of our hotel, and I’m hoping that the Yelp reviews will help me get a sense of the places I’m considering. In aggregate, I suppose Yelp ratings can do that—but tapping into specific reviews was a mistake. I don’t care that your flight got in late and so you were really hungry when you got to the restaurant. I don’t care about your history as a burrito eater in Texas and California and how it affects your thoughts on Utah burritos. I don’t care that it was snowing heavily when you went to dinner. I award these Yelp reviews one star out of five.

There’s still no good way to travel with tea. For those of you who have missed a tea-related update in the Six Colors Magazine, congratulations! You’ve found it. It’s hard to travel as a tea drinker, because making tea is fiddly (you can’t leave the tea in the water or it gets bitter after a few minutes) and most of the tea hotels and restaurants provide is terrible. This trip I brought a couple of in-mug tea infusers and some of the loose tea we use at home, and that did the job in the rental condos. I also bought a travel thermos, which was awesome at keeping our tea hot for hours after we made it, but we only used it one time. I’m still figuring out the right gadgets to bring to get morning tea when we want it. We mostly did okay this time.

I endorse the Wirecutter’s camping pick. I haven’t set up a tent since I was a Cub Scout, and boy, has the technology improved. We bought the Wirecutter’s choice for best tent and I can endorse this endorsement. It was easy to set up and served us well in the alfalfa field in Idaho where we awaited the solar eclipse. The 30-Day Duro Camping Lantern was also pretty great.

If I had to do it all over again… I’d pretty much take what we took, though I’d leave the Apple TV at home and make sure to call AT&T to up our data plan. But summer’s over, now, so I guess I’ll have to file all of this away for 2018.

By Dan Moren

August 31, 2017 5:21 PM PT

By Request: Family Tech Support Etiquette

Subscriber Brian (hello, Brian!) asks about matters of tech support etiquette when it comes to family.

Now, first up, let’s slap a big old disclaimer on this. All of our families are different, and all of our thresholds are different. A lot of this is going to depend on your own relationships and what you feel comfortable doing, so what follows is just my own opinion and experience.

Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve ever turned down a tech support request from anybody in my family. That’s in large part because a) I love my family and am on generally pretty good terms with all of them and b) I like making sure that things work correctly. Here’s an example.

During my recent vacation, I spent some time at my cousin’s house. Her husband (to whom she has been married for most of my life) is a pretty tech-savvy guy and a fellow nerd, so I was puzzled when I sat down to record an episode of The Rebound and realized that the Internet was incredibly slow: around 1.5Mbps download speeds, which seemed unbelievable for a cable modem connection. He insisted everything was running through an AirPort Extreme and said he’d gotten a cable tech over to set up a new modem and connect everything within the last few months. Naturally, that immediately raised my suspicions.

Our subsequent investigation determined a few things: first, the cable modem also contained a router, which was still broadcasting its own Wi-Fi networks—that’s less than ideal when it’s about a foot from the AirPort Extreme, since it can cause a whole lot of interference. I managed to disable the Wi-Fi networks on the router, and that improved the speed to passable levels. The next complication was that the cable modem’s built-in router was handling all the network routing functions instead of the AirPort and the tech had connected the AirPort to the cable modem via the LAN port, so it wasn’t doing too much of anything.

After reconfiguring everything and making sure the AirPort was handling routing functions, we ran another speedtest on a Mac mini connected via Ethernet to the AirPort Extreme: 75Mbps down and a much more reliable upstream connection.

Now, this was certainly a case where my own self-interest intersected with helping make sure the tech was working correctly, but I’ve also spent plenty of time setting up printers, configuring iPads, and advising on purchase decisions.

I realize that this isn’t perhaps everybody’s cup of tea, and there are times when it definitely gets overwhelming. But in the end, this is less an issue of technology than one of communication. It’s important to explain your limits to those in your life who might want help with your area of expertise. There are a few ways I’d suggest of handling this:

Equipment – I know folks who have set ground rules about what platforms and equipment they will work on. I.e. “If you have a Mac, I’ll help you out, but I don’t know Windows at all.” That might work for establishing boundaries and preventing you from whiling away hours banging your head against a problem that you don’t know how to solve. Some of the tech savvy people of my acquaintaince also insist they be the one to set up any new piece of hardware in order to minimize future hassles.

Timing – Sometimes it helps to set up a particular time and date for the specific purpose of working through technology problems. For example, for Christmas last year, we got my uncle an iPad, and I made a lunch date with him to go through the basics of setting it up and using it. That way tech problems don’t end up, say, hijacking Thanksgiving dinner.

Barter – Not everybody’s comfortable asking for something in exchange for technical services, but sometimes it can help remind people that you’re using your skills for their benefit. So coming up with a way to say, “Hey, I’m happy to help you out—any chance you’d be willing to spring for some lunch?” can be helpful. Or perhaps there’s a skilled task that they can perform in kind for you.

Education – This is the ultimate goal, but it’s also in my experience the hardest sell. Not everybody is inclined to learn and some people definitely have a tougher time adapting than others. Only you know your family well enough to gauge whether this will be well received, but setting aside regular time to help teach some family members could help save you trouble down the road.

Tools – I set up remote troubleshooting tools for more than a few members of my family, depending on the technology available. This sometimes means giving myself the ability to screen share to someone’s computer, for example. (I like Screens Connect for that.) In other cases, you may consider setting restrictions on some devices so that settings can’t be altered. Again, these solutions depend on the comfort level of you and the person you’re helping.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for handling tech support for family and friends. In the end, anybody who has these skills has to decide for themselves how they want to use them and who they want to share them with.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Stephen Hackett

August 31, 2017 5:19 PM PT

The Hackett File: Tapping the reset button

Assuming nothing bonkers happens between now and then, next month will mark the release of iOS 11, macOS High Sierra, watchOS 4 and tvOS 11.

The Apple TV and Apple Watch updates seem like they’ll be nice, but I don’t think they will change the way I work day to day. High Sierra is a bigger deal than tvOS 11 or watchOS 4, but as nice as it is to have a “Snow Leopard” year, I think the biggest changes to my workflow will come with iOS 11.

That’s no surprise, of course. The new multitasking scheme, complete with the Dock and Spaces, coupled with drag and drop, promises to make the iPad a much more serious machine for work for those like me who have generally chosen the Mac as their tool of choice when it comes to work.

I think any OS update, regardless of impact and scope, offers an opportunity to start afresh.

Let’s talk about the 5K iMac I’m sitting in front of at the moment. I’ve had it almost a year, and am very happy with it, but the user I log in to when I sit down at it is much older than the computer itself.

By looking through my user library and other folders, the best I can tell, the user is one I set up around 2010. It has made the jump through a string of MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs before being migrated to this iMac a year ago.

There are preference files for applications that have been deleted for years, and support folders for programs that aren’t for sale anymore. It’s all a bit crufty, thanks to macOS’ unwillingness to delete support files when an .app bundle is removed from the system.

None of these files are causing any problems, and besides a 2 GB Evernote folder I found that I no longer need, none of it is taking up much space on my iMac’s SSD.

That’s not to say that cruft doesn’t accumulate in the corners of iOS, either. I have some long-forgotten games and apps stashed into folders on both my iPhone and iPad, just longing to see the light of day one more time. Thankfully, removing them is just a long-press and tap away.

I came across this in a big way on my iPad after installing the Public Beta of iOS 11. The Dock made me rethink my iPad home screen in a big way, and before I knew it, I was slinging apps and folders around, totally dismantling a setup that I had enjoyed for years.

Like my iMac, my iPad and iPhone setups has survived many upgrades and restores as I’ve hopped from device to device over the years. When I unbox a new iPhone next month, I’m really considering taking the time and starting anew, foregoing restoring an iTunes or iCloud backup.

Some will say that doing so will make an iOS device run faster and smoother. I’m not sure that’s true unless something has gone wrong, but the idea of starting with a nice, clean device, set up and arranged to take advantage of all iOS 11 has to offer in a tempting idea. It’d be a bit of work to sign back into a ton of apps and services, but doing so lends itself to making decisions about what I actually need on my device, as opposed to what I’ve been shuttling along over the years.

[Stephen Hackett is the author of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay FM.]

By Jason Snell

August 31, 2017 5:16 PM PT

Silence is golden

I generally work with music playing. Modern pop-rock music, complete with singing. This seems to put me in the middle of a spectrum of people I know, with those who can work with podcasts playing over on one side, and those who must have complete silence on the other. Some people can listen to music, but only music without singing. Me, I can listen to music with words—but it has to be music I know well, so that it can fade into the background. I can’t do music discovery while I’m writing.

The point is, all of our brains process input in different ways. One person’s distraction is fuel for another person to get into the flow. Different jobs, too, require different inputs. If I’m outlining a story or really grappling with what my argument is, I sometimes need to turn everything off and focus even more. But as the words come pouring out, a little familiar musical accompaniment can do the trick. A few years back I wrote most of a novel alternating between electronic-pop singer Imogen Heap and pop-punk band Say Anything.

Sound’s not the only distraction we have, though. The more functional our devices become, the better they get at distracting us. The Internet is a distraction enough—though there are tools like Freedom that can help—but these days we’re also bombarded with notifications and animations. Sometimes I’m cranking away at an article on my Mac, only to notice that a floating Notification Center alert is fading away. What did it say? I have no idea—there’s no record of it in the Notification Center window. It failed to nudge me when it appeared, and distracted me uselessly as it exited.

One of the things that has driven me to write more on my iPad is that I find iOS less distracting than my Mac. Not that there still aren’t push notifications on the iPad—though I’m trying to turn as many of them off as possible. But on my 27-inch iMac, I generally have many apps open at once—including social networking apps. Even when hidden, they’re sitting right there, waiting for me to open them.

Even though I can run two (or even three!) apps at a time on my iPad, I generally don’t. When I do, the second app is part of the work I’m doing—adding Safari so I can look up links for a story I’m writing, for instance—rather than a distracting set of messaging tools.

The truth is, I’ve configured my Mac and iPad differently and I use them differently. My Mac is a hub of different apps, more prone to distraction but also a place where I can more easily pass information back and forth. It works well for writing, but there’s a little more possibility for distraction. My iPad is more locked down, quieter, a place where I can write with fewer distractions. This isn’t to say that I don’t use my iPad to distract myself—first thing in the morning I’m hopping on Slack and Twitter to see what’s going on—but when I’m writing it provides me some focus that’s maybe lacking when I sit at my Mac.

I’m not trying to say that the Mac is fundamentally more distracting than iOS. But old habits die hard. I suppose if I wanted a MacBook to behave like my iPad behaves, I could do it, through the generous use of full-screen apps. I never use full-screen apps on the Mac, yet they’re the default on iOS and I don’t mind at all. Why do you suppose that is? I suspect it’s that I’ve trained myself to use the Mac a certain way, and think of it as a certain sort of tool—while I use my iPad differently, and for different purposes.

You may approach this situation completely differently. Do you use an iMac at your desk, and a MacBook at home on the couch? Same operating system, but two very different working environments—and I suspect the MacBook might be a great device for focus if you fully embrace full-screen mode.

Or maybe it doesn’t matter at all to you. Maybe your productivity doesn’t change, no matter where you go. After all, we’re all different—which is why some of us need to work in silence, while others won’t feel productive until some loud singer is screaming in their ears.