Colin Charles Agenda

• Texas LinuxFest – July 8-9 2016 – Austin, Texas – I’ve never spoken at this event before but have heard great things about it. I’ve got a morning talk about what’s in MariaDB Server 10.1, and what’s coming in 10.2.
• db tech showcase – July 13-15 2016 – Tokyo, Japan – I’ve regularly spoken at this event and its a case of a 100% pure database conference, with a very captive audience. I’ll be talking about the lessons one can learn from other people’s database failures (this is the kind of talk that keeps on changing and getting better as the software improves).
• The MariaDB Tokyo Meetup – July 21 2016 – Tokyo, Japan – Not the traditional meetup timing, since its 1.30pm-7pm, there will be many talks and its organised by the folk behind the SPIDER storage engine. It should be fun to see many people and food is being provided too. In Japanese: MariaDB コミュニティイベント in Tokyo, MariaDB Community Event in TOKYO.

Via Recode, Spotify says Apple won’t approve a new version of its app because it doesn’t want competition for Apple Music.

Why is this surprising to Spotify? Amazon has a Kindle app on the App Store but doesn’t sell books inside said app. Its Apple’s App Store, you play by their rules, no?

I read the New York Times which presumably allows you to subscribe via the app, but I log in via my account since I have a direct relationship with them. I read the Financial Times, and they didn’t want to play by the App Store rules – they’re a full-featured HTML5 application.

Maybe Spotify should take heed from the FT and invest further in play.spotify.com? (The spec obviously support it, since Rdio had a browser based interface before Spotify did; I don’t know the status of how mobile browsers handle it.)

I have been an Evernote user since February 2009, and I believe I found it extremely valuable and useful that I have dutifully paid $45/year for probably that long. Sara practically lives in the application on her Mac, iPad and iPhone. As of this writing, I have 18,198 notes.

Today they have announced changes to their pricing plans. For what I’m using, it would be $69.99/year, which is nearly a 56% markup!

I’m going to continue paying, but I fear many will be thinking about alternatives. The real discussions are at the forum which I encourage you to read. There are more alternatives these days — Microsoft’s OneNote (has an importer), Apple Notes is getting better, and so on.

There are still deficiencies with Evernote. Try exporting your scanned business cards as a CSV? Try two people editing the same document – you’ll notice locking. We’ve seen premium users go from “unlimited” to 10GB storage per month (not that I use all of that space). They’ve killed apps like Hello, Food. They’ve arguably made Skitch worse. They’ve once even lost data from Sara’s iPad – drawings from Penultimate disappeared. There was no resolution beyond the PNGs and JPGs I managed to extract.

If you ended up purchasing merchandise, like the Fujitsu iX500 ScanSnap Evernote edition or a Moleskine Evernote Smart Notebook you would have received points in your Evernote account. 10 points buys you a month, 120 points buys you a year – its unclear if this will change (it probably will), but I just spent 160 points to extend my Evernote account.

Phil Libin once talked about how Evernote would be a 100-year old startup. He also talked about how you turn loyal users into paid customers. He’s a big fan of Stewart Brand’s book, The Clock of the Long Now. Alas, he’s now a VC and there’s a hired CEO at the helm. Maybe we’ll get a Steve Jobs/Apple return moment at some stage. Till then, here’s to Evernote’s longevity.

I cannot imagine what it is like to be on a plane that has engine problems and catches fire upon landing. I’m glad everyone (222 passengers, 19 crew) are safe.

I was just taking a long haul flight myself and wondering why they bother showing the safety video, since these days you don’t really find the need for such things (planes disappear; they crash; you rarely hear about how putting on one’s lifejacket saved your life).

As an aside, a lot of the photos (and a video) seem to come from a Ms. Lee Bee Yee, who was presumably flying to Milan to perform “personal shopping” services (she is the proprietor of a site called Premium Mall). A simple search of her name reveals that she’s been 43 for quite sometime! Emerging Trend of Online Retailers Attempting to Evade GST Jan/Feb 2015, Singapore Airlines plane catches fire on Changi Airport runway; no injuries reported. I’m sure there are such “personal shoppers” operating in Malaysia too; I can only imagine what happens when customs catches up.

The Star in Malaysia recently reported that the future might be personal shoppers, in Parkson’s decline a sign of the times for retail stores. The whole article is worth a read, because Malaysia in this respect, seems “backwards” to what is taking much of the retail world by storm (key: nationwide e-commerce needs to rock; too much just focus on the Klang Valley). But the fancy quote for one to think about:

The future wave could be the birth of “personal shoppers” where they shop for others for a fee.

A “personal shopper” acts as a conduit to connect individual purchasers with online websites in other countries such as the United States that do not provide delivery services of their products to this part of the world.

The personal shopper takes down orders, secures an appropriate price and sources for the products in a foreign country. The personal shopper then handles the delivery from the foreign country to the customer.

And it is all done at a fraction of a cost compared to what the boutiques charge.

At the moment, celebrities generally engage the services of “personal shoppers” also known as “personal groomers” to source for their clothes.

In recent times, services of “personal shoppers” have been engaged by professionals and the working crowd to get the best bargains from the Internet.

Its Sunday evening here in NYC, and it would seem that I have a huge amount of tabs open in my browser. On the flight here I just read Running Lean by Ash Maurya, tried to catch up on some past issues of The Economist and The New Yorker, and work at clearing out Instapaper.

• From Berlin to Barcelona; will Airbnb ruin our most loved cities?
• The 23 best business books to read this summer – I already own via pre-order, Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday and I probably will want to read The Third Wave by Steve Case and The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly.
• APFS in Detail: Overview
• Blockchains and Buzzwords. Related: CRITICAL UPDATE Re: DAO Vulnerability, Thinking About Smart Contract Security.
• Something to definitely spend some spare time on: Hello, TensorFlow!
• A handy guide to making money in open source.
• Samsung acquires Joyent: A CTO’s perspective
• Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail
• Open Source is losing, SaaS is leading, APIs will win…
• The Art of Closing
• Beyond GDP — is it time to rethink the way we measure growth?

I downloaded Windows 10 as an ISO from Microsoft. To make a bootable USB disk, I followed the instructions in this article, basically using the Boot Camp Assistant.

The installation went on without a hitch. I was never asked for any product key, presumably because Windows 8 Pro did boot on my device once, before it was wiped to replace it with Ubuntu a few months ago.

Updating software makes sense of course so I did that. I found it odd that you could login to Windows using your Microsoft ID (i.e. your email address + password). Good thing it supports setting up a PIN, because I use a password that I can’t remember (hello 1Password).

Setting up Chrome and ensuring you’re logged in means you get a similar environment everywhere (so for me, this is the same across the Mac and the Chromebook).

The Lenovo ThinkPad X240 comes with a fingerprint reader and once your PIN is setup, you can ensure that the fingerprint reader works as well. I followed the instructions on the Lenovo forum.

Figuring office software would be important, Office 365 was installed in a rather quick fashion. To save a license seat, I removed it from the Mac using AppCleaner, saving 7.61GB of space!

Drivers seem to be something one needs to install (which is unfortunate). Lenovo requires their System Interface Foundation, and the Lenovo Settings application, since the battery management benefits from it (otherwise you get a famous message, “plugged in, not charging”). Lenovo Battery Gauge is another from Lenovo’s support site. Shockingly, you have no idea what you need to install to get things going.

Windows does have an app store now but it’s not complete so to speak (i.e. some apps require things outside the app store so you get it via a browser). Installing software that affects the system naturally means you go through a reboot cycle fairly often (which is still an annoyance in Windows land it would seem).

I enjoy my Caps Lock key being an additional Control key, and the easiest way to do this is via Ctrl2Cap. Unsurprisingly, this also requires a reboot to take effect.

Unfortunately travel beckons, and I am only planning to take one laptop with me, so till the next month till I provide updates on my Microsoft Windows adventures.