thebaldgeek

My mate BA had a bit of a scare a few weeks back when his laptop hard drive refused to spin up from cold.
Doing the old trick of removing it, giving it a bump and putting it back in got the laptop to boot.

He got the hint and asked me about hard drive upgrade options.
I did not hesitate and recommended he go with a solid state drive rather than his current (and fading typical) spinning drive.
Having no moving parts its lower power and faster in every way over his current drive.
He took my advice and is very happy with the speed bump he got – and cold boot worries are now a thing of the past.

So how long will his new drive last?
It’s been a common question. Since there is no moving parts, there is nothing to wear out right?
Well, yes and no.
Yes, there are no bearings, motors and such, so in that regard, there is nothing to wear out.
But the memory has to remember the data you write to it. Even when you switch off the computer and remove the drive, it still has to remember the data.
So, it has to be physically written to the chip and thats the bit can wear out.

Ok, so how long before BA’s new drive carks it?
As it happens, a long time.

http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes

MORE THAN A YEAR AGO, we drafted six SSDs for a suicide mission. We were curious about how many writes they could survive before burning out. We also wanted to track how each one’s performance characteristics and health statistics changed as the writes accumulated. And, somewhat morbidly, we wanted to watch what happened when the drives finally expired.

These guys decided to find out.
So, they set up a system that just wrote and then read back insane amounts of data. It was an accelerated test setup. In day to day use none of us reads and writes this amount of data, but if the test was done with normal use, it would be tens of years before we got any meaningful results.

The last victim fell at 1.2PB, which is barely a speck in the rear-view mirror for our remaining subjects. The 840 Pro and a second HyperX 3K have now reached two freaking petabytes of writes. To put that figure into perspective, the SSDs in my main desktop have logged less than two terabytes of writes over the past couple years. At this rate, it’ll take me a thousand years to reach that total.

Its long 4 page read if you are really interested, but that last quote is the guts of the matter.
At the amount BA uses his computer (no offence mate, but you’re not exactly a power user, you only have 1-2 tabs open in your web browser most days….)
Its going to take BA many many many lifetimes before his SSD shows any signs of wearing out.

Even my other mates Gary and Dan who can push a computer a bit harder have nothing to worry about.
So, what are you waiting for, if your current hard drive burps, run, don’t walk, and install an SSD.
You won’t wear it out. Not even a little bit.

Mildly interesting thought piece on the death of the cell/mobile phone.

http://www.rethink-wireless.com/2014/11/18/giants-quickly-smartphone-era-ends.htm

Google, Sony, Lenovo and even, to some extent, Apple (whose market share is far better protected by its brand than the others) are all fleeing the price wars and commoditization of the smartphone space, and seeking to expand into wearables, smart home hubs, post-PC large-screened gadgets – as well as developing the new user experiences and content types which will turn those new form factors into consumer hits.

To a large extent I agree.
Here is why;

Intel told Bloomberg: “The lines are blurring between PCs, tablets, phablets and phones. The idea is to accelerate the implementation and create some efficiency so that we can move even faster.”

Smaller, cheaper, faster. That’s about the only way to make money these days I think. The big companies are seeing that they no longer can make one product for years and years, things are moving too fast and they have to be more nimble.

This was highlighted at Samsungs developer forum last week, where the focus was firmly on non-handset categories such as wearables, enterprise platforms and the IoT, and on a major internet push. Samsung is transferring about 500 engineers from smartphones – only weeks after it announced a Q314 profit crash in its mobile division – mainly to the IoT activity, according to sources.

500 engineers is a LOT of resources to move, even in a large company like Samsung.
There will be a knock on effect from this in other companies as well. They will see what Samsung is coming up with and rush to market competing products as well.
The end result for the consumer? Hard to say. Cell / Mobile phones are not going away, we all know that much, but we will see the lines blurred for sure in that area.
I think the more interesting aspect of decline in phone sales is the coming uptick in IoT device sales.

Lastly this;

The other main tactic will be to ensure that a couple of high end models, at least, are clearly differentiated from the pack. Yi said: “In low- to mid-end products, price is the most important, and for high-end products, it is innovation.” Here, Samsung is pinning its hopes here on a flexible display, tapping into the resources of its screens division to produce 30,000 to 40,000 of these components a month by the end of 2015, according to Lee Chang-hoon, VP of the business strategy team at Samsung Display. These screens can be folded in half and so will go further than the curved display which makes the Galaxy Note Edge so distinctive (and which has seen strong consumer uptake).

Since the phone has become more of a computer than just phone, I am looking forward to more innovation and higher spec’ed / performance phones than the ‘me too’ phones we saw last year.

I guess at the end of the day this blog entry is just about a heads up of the coming shift in these large companies as they restructure to cash in on the IoT boom.

I don’t consider myself a designer, I’m a hacker. I mash up stuff, that is to say, I take a bunch of different things and make them a single useful thing, or I take something and make it do something it was not originally designed to do.

In other words, it’s not very often I have to think about the UX (User eXperience) from a clean sheet of paper.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/11/how-is-ux-for-iot-different.html

Designing for IoT comes with a bunch of challenges that will be new to designers accustomed to pure digital services. How tricky these challenges prove will depend on:

The maturity of the technology you’re working with

The context of use or expectations your users have of the system

The complexity of your service (e.g. how many devices the user has to interact with).

Below is a summary of the key differences between UX for IoT and UX for digital services.

It’s a good read. I really enjoyed thinking about the different aspects that go into designing for the best user experience.
Tempted as I am to quote every point they make, I will narrow it down to the following;

IoT devices come in a wide variety of form factors, with varying input and output capabilities. Some may have screens, such as heating controllers or washing machines. Some may have other ways of communicating with us (such as flashing LEDs or sounds).

Some may have no input or output capabilities at all and are unable to tell us directly what they are doing. Interactions might be handled by web or smartphone apps. Despite the differences in form factors, users need to feel as if they are using a coherent service rather than a bunch of disjointed UIs.

At this stage I have mostly been using either a smartphone or a web browser as my UI. (User Interface), so its been nice to have plenty of space and present all the data I care about to the the user (me).
That said, I need to start thinking about more minimal applications. Like they say, what if all I have is an LED.
Is it single color or multi? How do I convey all the states the device has to offer to the user.
My memory is shot at the best of times, memorizing flash codes is just not an option…….
Then there is the last point they raise, making sure that no matter what the service or device I am using, how do I make sure that the user feels that they are all part of the one experience?

We don’t expect internet-like failures from the real world

It’s frustrating when a web page is slow to download or a Skype call fails. But we accept that these irritations are just part of using the Internet. By contrast, real-world objects respond to us immediately and reliably.

When we interact with a physical device over the Internet, that interaction is subject to the same latency and reliability issues as any other Internet communication. So, there’s the potential for delays in response and for our requests and commands to go missing altogether. This could make the real world start to feel very broken. Imagine if you turned your lights on and they took two minutes to respond, or failed to come on at all.

This one is huge. It has been on my mind for a long time.
If a device HAS to phone home to change state, I have a lot of alarm bells ringing in my head right from the very start.
Most of what I have built at my house works in the confines of my home network. That is to say, if my Internet connection goes down, most of my house still works.
Ok, good, I can check that one off the list, but the latency issue is still an issue.
My mashup code is not always as efficient as it could be….. that means it takes time for the digital signal to pass from one process to another. At times it lags. Other times it’s snappy.
This is something I am going to have to change the way I think, its not just about my code, its about the user experience and what they take away from using the system.

Many IoT devices run on batteries and need to conserve electricity. Maintaining network connections uses a lot of power, so they only connect intermittently. This means that parts of the system can be out of sync with each other, creating discontinuities in the user experience. For example, imagine your heating is set to 19 degrees celsius. You use the heating app on your phone to turn it up to 21C, but it takes a couple of minutes for your battery powered heating controller to go online to check for new instructions. During this time, the phone says 21C, and the controller says 19C.

I’m just on the cusp of this one…. Just now starting to look at a few devices that can exhibit this delay….
It never occurred to me that this out of sync issue is simply poor design.
Part of that stems from the fact that I am both the creator and the consumer. I know why its out of sync and that it will (eventually) get in sync, but that’s just lame. The whole point of a lot of what I work on is to help others. To give them tools to solve similar challenges in their work places.
In other words. I am a designer, and I need to start thinking like one!

Code can run in many more places

The configuration of devices and code that makes a system work is called the system model. In an ideal world, users should not have to care about this. We don’t need to understand how conventional Internet services, like Amazon, work in order to use them successfully. But as a consumer of an IoT service right now, you can’t always get away from some of this technical detail.

A typical IoT service is composed of:

one or more embedded devices

a cloud service

perhaps a gateway device

one or more control apps running on a different device, such as a mobile, tablet, or computer.

Yeah. Pretty much knew this, and have dealt with it most of my life, but (again) never thought of it as a design challenge (or issue).

If I have whet your appetite, then please check out the whole article. It really is an interesting read.

My takeaway?
I have a lot of work to do and a new hat to wear.

Creepy cool.

Some of you readers no doubt have been to the odd conference, trade or otherwise. The usual badge wearing and swapping of business cards is core at those kinds of things…..
It’s only logical then that the next step be taken, and make it a lot more seamless…..

http://postscapes.com/conference-analytics-loopd-bluetooth-badge

Business cards are already giving way to tap-to-send contact sharing apps, and now even those apps are getting an upgrade from location-aware wearables like the Loopd badge.

Designed with conferences and other networking-centric gatherings in mind, Loopd offers small, inexpensive Bluetooth Low-Energy beacons that give every attendee a unique digital identifier. By tracking each badge’s connections with other badges and with stationary beacons, the Loopd software can keep track of every wearer’s location in real time and provide detailed analytics on a complete event.

It’s pretty simple really, you just wear the tag and forget about everything.
Your every contact, trade stand visit, personal meetup in the isale, even your visit to the food (and yeah, probably restroom) stand will be tracked and you can review it later – along with everyone else.

It’s based on iBeacon tech. You wear the beacon and the conference space has a bunch of receivers around the hall and log every signal strength of each beacon as it moves around the space.
If you stop and talk to someone, the system will see that your beacon and someone elses beacon are in the same place for the same amount of time and presto, it will link the two of you….. Yum.

I can see how it’s going to add a lot of value to the exhibits, and the folks that run the conference, but personally…… I just don’t know if I am ready for such a thing.