Technology
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Last week, was a whirlwind week in the US wireless industry. Before then, only T-Mobile and Sprint offered unlimited data plans to all customers, but by the end of the week all four major carriers offered them. On Monday, Verizon announced that it was resurrecting its unlimited wireless plan, and a few days later, AT&T announced that it was also offering an unlimited wireless plan to all customers, whereas it was only available to DirecTV subscribers.
Although all four carriers offer 4G LTE data, there’s an implicit hierarchy among the wireless carriers in the United States. At the top, AT&T and Verizon have the most mature networks that cover the most terrain and carry the most expensive pricing. Below them is a second tier of carriers, namely T-Mobile and Sprint. Their networks cover less terrain and are perceived as being less robust in terms of network connectivity. Because of this perception, they have been the most aggressive about pricing. That is why they were, before last week, the only carriers to offer unlimited plans.
To be sure, the only reason Verizon’s and AT&T’s unlimited plans emerged last week was because of the competitive pressure that T-Mobile and Sprint have put on Verizon and AT&T. Verizon likely felt the squeeze was too much to bear and capitulated with its new unlimited plan. AT&T likely saw this and quickly reacted by expanding its unlimited plan to everyone. It’s safe to say that none of this would have happened had AT&T been allowed to acquire T-Mobile.
For readers who are carrier-agnostic and are considering switching to an unlimited plan, Mac Rumors has produced a nifty comparison between the four unlimited plans offered by the majors. But as the kids today say, YMMV.
Unlimited vs. Unlimited
I was immediately intrigued by these new offerings. I have been on the grandfathered unlimited data plan that AT&T once offered with iPhones. I have held on to it despite the introduction of less-expensive metered data plans and a $5-per-month rate increase instituted last year that was due to increase by another $5 next month. Another factor in my intrigue was that I have two other lines on my plan: one is on a metered 3 GB data plan (labelled below as “Line 2”) and the other (labelled “Line 3”) is on a grandfathered unlimited data plan. I also receive a 20% employee discount through my employer.
Here’s a comparison between my current talk, text, and data plan; my current talk, text, and data plan after the impending rate hike in March; and AT&T’s new unlimited plan. (All prices are rounded to the nearest dollar, and they do not include taxes and fees, which I am considering as a wash between all these plans.)
| Description |
Talk, Text, Data Plan |
Effective March 2017 |
New Unlimited Plan |
| Base Plan |
$60 |
$60 |
$60 |
| Text Messaging |
$30 |
$30 |
— |
| Line 1 |
$35 |
$40 |
$40 |
| Line 2 |
$45 |
$50 |
$40 |
| Line 3 |
$40 |
$40 |
$40 |
| Discount |
-$32 |
-$34 |
-$12 |
| TOTAL |
$178 |
$186 |
$168 |
As you can see, the new unlimited plan for all three lines is about $10 less than the current talk, text, and data plan that I share with two other lines.
The savings are greater after factoring in the impending $5 per-month rate increase, effective March 2017, for each grandfathered unlimited data plan (Lines 1 and 3 in the table above). I guess AT&T’s strategy to bully us off the unlimited data plan finally worked!
Another factor to consider is that Line 2, the metered plan, often exceeds the 3 GB data allotment. AT&T bills the data overage at $10 per GB. I considered switching to a plan with more data, but the next higher offering is $50 for 5 GB. There is no “discount” for more data at this next plan; it’s similarly priced at $10 per GB, as is the base 3 GB and any associated overages. With Line 2 on an unlimited plan, there will be no more overage charges.
If I add a fourth line, it will, in effect, be free because AT&T reimburses you $40 each month for that fourth line, after a two–billing-cycle “waiting” period. That would significantly reduce the price per line.
But Why Stick with AT&T?
Although AT&T’s new unlimited plan is the most expensive of the four major wireless carriers and is the only one that doesn’t offer tethering, I prefer to stay with AT&T for three reasons:
- I am receiving $650 in bill credits from AT&T for my iPhone 7. When Apple introduced the iPhone 7 last September, AT&T allowed you to trade-in your iPhone 6 for up to $650 in credit towards an iPhone 7. You could get effectively get a base model iPhone 7 for free. Since I opted for the 128 GB instead of the base 32 GB model, I am paying the extra $100 over 30 months, which works out to about $3.30 per month. Should I leave AT&T, I will have to pay the remaining balance, which is significant.
- The AT&T wireless network is superior to the others where I live and work. Although it was hardly true a few years ago, AT&T has a very reliable wireless network in New York, particularly the neighborhoods I frequent. I considered switching to the more affordable plans on T-Mobile or Sprint, but after speaking to friends and colleagues, I resisted switching because those networks are not as reliable as AT&T’s. Moreover, Verizon had a potent 3G network that put AT&T’s to shame. In the 4G LTE era, the opposite is true. AT&T operates a robust network in New York that seems to outperform Verizon’s network, according to the testimony of my friends and colleagues.
- Tethering is not a factor. The unlimited plan never allowed tethering so I am not going to miss what I don’t have.
What Should You Do?
An unlimited plan isn’t for everyone. Most mortals use a surprisingly small amount of data, less than 3GB per month, so an unlimited plan would be excessive for them. Personally, I wonder if that’s because most wireless users have conditioned themselves to restrict their data usage for fear of overages. For the majority of those users, I say stick with your metered plan.
But I use a lot of data, regularly between 3 GB and 6 GB, per month, as sometimes as high as 12 GB. I like not having to worry about overages. Also, Line 2 on my plan, the one with the 3 GB plan, would regularly exceed those allotments. I doubt he would be happy turning on “safe mode” to slow down the data transfers to 2G speeds. The unlimited plan works for us, but it might not be the best for you. As I literally said before, YMMV.
Conclusion
In the end, the small but measurable savings between the talk, text, and data plan of yore and the new unlimited plan made a lot of sense. But also, my wanting to stay loyal to AT&T played a significant factor. As much as we all hate the cable company, the airline, and the wireless carrier, AT&T has been just fine for me. I certainly suffered when the iPhone was exclusive to AT&T, as making a phone call or transmitting data seemingly never worked, but in the 4G LTE era, things are different. Of course, this might change when 5G emerges as a standard, but that is still a couple of years away. And if AT&T falters, I’ll be off-contract. I can always switch to another plan or provider.
Update: AT&T announced on Monday, February 27, that it is introducing two new unlimited plans. I’m mulling it over and will repost here about what I think to do.
Update 2: I switched to the new Unlimited Plus plan.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t use OCR for converting documents into plain text as much as I probably should. It is a very handy utility, and it is one that computers have been doing for a long time. Indeed, I remember using OCR in college, at the computer lab where I worked, scanning a single page of print and watching the software read it and turn it into plain text with astonishing accuracy. It seemed like magic.
And what did I do with that magical text? I took that text, put it in a Word document, and printed it out.
Today, there’s many more useful things to do with OCR, particularly for scholars and academics. One example is to share the text of historical primary documents instead of an image files of the documents. For years, I have been sharing with my students readings as PDF files, but in the mobile-first era of the web, it makes much more sense to share a webpage that someone can easily read on a mobile device, instead of a PDF that they have to pinch-and-zoom—or even print out—to read.
Earlier this week, I began sharing with my students plain text files, instead of PDF scans, of readings not available in their textbooks. Doing this yields some benefits:
- They can read the text on mobile devices.
- Visually impaired students can use a screen reading device to “read” the document.
- They can search the text.
- They can resize the text, either bigger or smaller.
- They can parse the text to read with a browser utility like Apple’s Safari Reader or a read-later application like Instapaper.
- They will appreciate the much smaller file size, like 100 times smaller, especially for students using a mobile device.
If sharing readings as plain text instead of PDF files makes so much sense, what took me so long?
Honestly, I didn’t know what tool I should use. I can’t remember the software I first used in 1997, but it’s safe to assume it doesn’t exist anymore. Acrobat offers OCR, but I haven’t had a Creative Cloud license since the days of Creative Suite 3. Although I have a lot of apps that can scan and convert to text, such as the one for a Doxie scanner or PDFPen+Scan for iOS, most of these readings are in PDF already. I don’t want to print and scan them just to do OCR.
Lo and behold, Google Drive converts PDF to text. I just learned about this yesterday, and I like the results. To use Google Drive for OCR, follow these three steps:
- Upload your PDF file to Google Drive, if it’s not there already.
- Right-click on the file
- Select Open With > Google Docs
After a few minutes, depending on the size of your document, you can see the converted text. The results are pretty good. Obviously, the clearer and better your text, the more accurate the OCR will be. One cool feature is that it “respects” the pagination and hyphenation of your original document. If your document has page headers or page footers, those will appear. Since I’m interested in capturing only the text—not the pagination or hyphenation—of the document, I have to remove those from my final text document.
The nice thing about having a plain text document is that you can lightly format it as needed. Since I use Markdown, I recommend using a Markdown-capable text editor to parse the text. You’ll have a relatively unadulterated text file and can export it to any format you want from there. You can export to PDF, unstyled HTML, or RTF. And as I did with my first try at OCR in 1997, you can even print it.
In “Trash of the Titans,” the 200th episode of The Simpsons from 1998, Homer runs for sanitation commissioner of Springfield as an outsider on a populist platform. Tired of having to take out his trash to the curb and paying for its collection, one of his first actions in office is to have his sanitation workers do household chores for everyone in Springfield. His platform was simple: “Can’t someone else do it?”
Last summer, I heard about a new app that seemed to reflect everything was wrong with the Silicon Valley, the tech industry, and the so-called gig economy: Pooper.
Pooper is an app that allows dog owners to take their dog for outdoor walks and let the dog defecate. Once your dog has dropped its deuce, you…
- open the app
- photograph the spot where your dog pooped
- someone arrives to scoop your dog’s shit
To put it in high-concept terms for Silicon Valley: It’s Uber for poop. Pooper!
If this sounds too good—or too awful—to be true, don’t worry, it is most certainly fake. And don’t confuse it with the other Pooper for when you need to poop.
Pooper is less an app or a work of comedy than it is a piece of conceptual art.
Pooper’s website contains all the hallmarks of a tech company. There’s a sandwich video, a familiar-looking mobile app that looks a lot like Uber, and a feature list illustrated with icons.
The Pooper service even mocks other tech services by offering three price points: a basic, a premium, and an unlimited tier.
The project creators intended to criticize the gig economy built into the service sector companies masquerading as revolutionary apps. They see these as contributing “to the downfall of society.”
A few years ago, when I polled students about driving for Uber or running errands on Task Rabbit, they responded favorably to these services and echoed the mantra of gig economy: it’s cool because it lets people make extra money on the side. However, as these students were attending a private university in New York City, I think they were only imagining themselves using these services—to get a cheap ride or have someone wait in line for a Cronut—and not actually working for these companies as independent contractors.
It’s early, but I have started to see a backlash of the gig economy. Pooper was one example that highlighted the other side of the tech-drive gig economy by including a link to “Become a Scooper.”
The Scooper page drew attention to the labor that the tech economy eliminates from view. The page is preposterously bright and sunny, promising that it’s good for everyone in terms of cleaner cities with less dog waste, extra income for scoopers, and a better environment with compostable scooping materials.
It sounds great, right? Sure, until you realize you’re picking up dog shit.
These mom-tech apps deliberately hide the humans doing the actual work. Seamless is perhaps the most deliberate about it: promising zero human contact. That’s a bold promise because a human has to prepare your food, another human has to package it, and one more has to deliver it. I suppose you could ask the delivery guy to leave it on the step outside to ensure you make truly have no face-to-face contact… or perhaps you don’t consider the delivery guy to be a human.
The same is true for similar apps. There’s always a human—probably a poorly paid one—doing the work you tapped on your app to avoid doing. It’s time to recognize that.
Just before the end of the year, people in my social network—and likely yours—were posting pictures of themselves from 2006 and 2016, ostensibly to compare their contemporary selves to their appearance ten years ago.
Rather than gaze at myself ten years ago, I thought it would be fun to compare a recent purchase of removable flash memory to another similar purchase from 10 years ago.
2006 USB Memory Stick
In 2006, I bought a removable USB memory stick, which was all the rage at the time in the days before Dropbox and other cloud storage solutions. The capacity was one (1) gigabyte and I paid $51.29 on Amazon. It might have seemed like a good deal at the time.
2016 SD Card
A few weeks ago, at the end of 2016, I ordered an SD card for my SLR camera. The capacity is thirty-two (32) gigabytes and I paid $14.99 on Amazon. In some ways, even this purchase seems a bit dated. SD cards seem like a niche product these days since the days of the compact digital camera, which drove those sales, seem to be over. Also, 32 GB is not a lot of capacity. Consider that I could buy 64 GB, 128 GB, and even 256 GB for about $25, $60, and $120, respectively.
To really summarize the difference between the two over the last ten years, consider that I bought something thirty-two times bigger, that is orders-of-magnitude faster, for less than a third of the price.
I may have changed over the last ten years, but I don’t think I can say I changed as much as flash memory.
The above links to Amazon are an affiliate links. If you buy something through those link, I will earn a commission fee.
Since 2009 or so, I’ve been using and preaching about using a password manager to generate and track all of your usernames and passwords. Until some other system comes along, the only way to safeguard your user accounts is to use a complex and unique password for every one of your accounts. If hackers steals a site’s user database and can decipher your credentials for that site, they can use those credentials to log in to other sites where you use the same password. But with a password manager, it’s easy to create strong and unique passwords for each site. And should hackers ever breach a site you use, you only need to change the password for that site because all your other accounts use a different password.
Yahoo Hacked… Again
Yesterday, Yahoo revealed that in 2013 hackers stole user information for about one-billion Yahoo accounts. By the way, this is a separate theft from the one the company disclosed earlier this year where thieves stole information from 500 million users in 2014.
The stolen user information includes (emphases are mine):
- name
- email addresses
- telephone number
- date of birth
- hashed passwords
- security questions and answers
Ordinarily, I would just change my password for any Yahoo account I have. The password manager would generate and store a new unique and complex password, and it would alert me if I had other accounts on Yahoo that needed the same treatment. It turns out I have two Yahoo accounts, although I haven’t used one of them since the 2008 or so.
Because so many people use the same password for multiple sites, it’s fairly common for sites that store usernames and passwords to hash (or encode) the passwords so that thieves can’t read them and use them to log in to your accounts. Apparently, Yahoo has done this but used a hashing technique that is cryptographically broken.
“Security” Questions Aren’t Secure
However, what seems even more troubling to me is that Yahoo might not have hashed the security questions and answers that act as workarounds to access your account when you forget your password. These “security questions” are a very primitive way of verifying a user. Twenty or so years ago, when you phoned your bank, they would verify your identity using your mother’s maiden name or your date of birth. But today that seems quaint because it’s not really secure: a close friend or relative easily knows that information.
Nonetheless, many websites have used similar security questions to “safeguard” your account:
- where were you born?
- what is the name of your favorite teacher?
- what is the make of your first car?
- what is your high school’s mascot?
- what was the name of first street you lived on?
- what was your first job?
With a little detective work, someone can learn all these bits of “secure” information about you. As a way to strengthen this system, I use fake answers for these security questions: some are random bits of text or some are just random names. I record these in a password manager.
However, since Yahoo didn’t appear to hash those security questions and answers, instead storing them as plain text, these could be used to reset your passwords on your accounts.
Time for Two-Factor Security
If I learned something from this breach, it’s that the time has come to get rid of security questions and instead force users to use two-factor authentication. This requires you to enter your password and a temporary code that is either generated by an app on your mobile device or sent to you by text message. This provides a small safeguard because if hackers learn your credentials, they still need a code to access your account.
It’s certainly more secure than the name of your childhood pet.
Despite using Apple Pay since getting an iPhone 6 in 2014, I didn’t know until today that Apple maintained an offers page, or at least that they posted one for the holidays.
There’s some very compelling offers, such as…
That last one comes about a week too late for me. I did take an MTA Metro North train after Thanksgiving, returning from an short bike ride to Tarrytown, but this offer didn’t take effect until December 1.
Also, the offer expires on January 1, which is a shame. I would have appreciated a discount on the $36 round-trip fare to Greenport or Montauk when cycling season begins anew next year.
Earlier this week, I had one of those moments when I realized that the system I was using to save time and money was costing me a lot of time and my employer a lot of money.
Then I remembered something that happened back in college.
As an undergraduate student at UCSB in the 1990s, I worked at the on-campus computer labs. At the time, our IT people were trying to figure out how to charge students to print at the labs.
What sounded like a simple process of procuring and installing a payment system, turned into an endless series of trials for one system after another…and a lot failures. Exasperated, the lab manager suggested that we abandon our efforts and take the paper out of the printers. “Can’t we just give students 50 sheets of paper each term and show them how ‘manual feed’ works?”
I don’t exactly remember what the final solution, but I wasn’t the “manual feed” solution. Regardless, I’m sure it doesn’t exist today.
Font Awesome is a font and icon toolkit based on CSS and LESS. Since I redesigned my sites in 2014, I have been using it to display the icons that you see pepper throughout the sites.
The Font Awesome icon pack has been free, but perhaps sensing that free was not a sustainable revenue model, the creators offered a series of subscription tiers for the upcoming version 5.
To raise some initial money, the creators turned to Kickstarter and offered early backers a discounted Pro membership. Their goal was to raise $30,000 to fund development of Font Awesome 5. The crowdfunding campaign ended early this morning, obliterating that goal. They raised over a million dollars. After reaching their initial goal, they set up several stretch goals after reaching certain fundraising milestones. Many of them are a little too technical for me to understand, but the last one in particular is that they pledged to open-source some of their frameworks. That’s pretty cool.
This however didn’t happen by accident. Raising funds of Kickstarter is now a cottage industry, and the guys at Font Awesome were very methodical in launching their campaign, even hiring a professional video production firm for their video.
The result is certainly impressive, and initially I thought they had produced it themselves: “What? These guys can make videos, too!?!” Knowing that they outsourced the video work—and that it cost them like $15,000—makes the Font Awesome guys seem a lot more human.
At the same time, though, their success shatters the myth that crowdfunding is a revolutionary way to raise funds. The Font Awesome campaign is extraordinary, being the most successful Kickstarter campaign to date. But it shows that to successfully raise funds, it helps that you already have funds.
As risky as it may sound to spend $15,000 on a three-minute video, it clearly helped Font Awesome raise a lot of funds. That’s not bad for something that started out as a free product.
Earlier this week, I attended a group session about Microsoft’s Office 365, the productivity software and services subscription. Of the four colleges where I have taught, the suite has been offered at only one: CUNY Queens College. However, as far as I know, Office 365 is only available to currently enrolled students and, strangely, not available to faculty or staff.
In today’s session, the session coordinator and a number of participants, including many who also teach at CUNY, insisted that faculty and staff have access to Office 365. I was a little embarrassed to have been corrected in a semi-public setting like that.
After searching various help documents on the Queens College website, it appears that I was right and everyone else was wrong. Office 365 is not available to faculty or staff at CUNY Queens College, only currently enrolled students.
A response from the IT Help Desk at Queens College also confirms this as much:
The Office 365 is for attending students only. Faulty and staff do however have the Office suite on their campus computers. They can also download a copy of Office 2016 through the CUNYPortal e-mall for home use. https://cunyportal.cuny.edu/cuny_eMall/
This I knew. I have a local version of Office 2016 for Home and Business on my Mac, but I am most interested in the Office 365 cloud functions and its apps for mobile devices.
I suspect that the participants in today’s session can’t distinguish between Office 365 as a subscription service and Office 2016 as the downloadable software that comes with Office 365. However, because the participants seem very clear on what Adobe Creative Cloud is, I suspect that it’s partly Microsoft’s problem with explaining the Office 365 product and distinguishing it from the venerable desktop apps, like Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.
But I am still puzzled as to why faculty can’t get Office 365 like the students. My sense it that has to do with students use one email system while faculty/staff are another. Students use Office 365 accounts with qmail.cuny.edu addresses, while faculty and staff use Outlook and are “grandfathered” with the older qc.cuny.edu addresses. Authorizing the site license might only allow a single domain associated with each organization.
On the other hand, both groups have access to Google Apps for Education, even if QC students, faculty, or staff are unable to use Gmail.
Despite being an unaccomplished and underachieving scholar, I still receive a fair-share of examination copies of academic trade books and textbooks. These are books that publishers provide for free for a “trial period.” Usually, the publisher doesn’t specify the length of the trial period so they are effectively free books, if not explicitly so. However, some publishers have explicitly requested that I ship the book back to them or else I will receive a bill for the book, albeit with an “industry” discount of 20% or so.
Publishers provide these books because they hope that I will adopt them for a course and require my students to purchase them. When I worked at UCSB’s college radio station in the mid-1990s, record companies would similarly provide free CDs for the music and programming directors in hopes that they would play the recordings on-the-air and, consequently, promote sales of the recording.
It seems like a great way to promote a book or a recording, but since everyone does it, the examination/promotional copies often become clutter. My music director used to give me a bunch of CDs that he knew I would like, and I have a pile of under-examined—or entirely unexamined—books on my desk.
Examination Copies that have gone unexamined.
Done Wrong
In the academic world, the examination copies of books arrive in one of two ways:
- The publisher sends a print copy. They have done so for as long as I’ve been in the game. Although it’s not as many as it used to be, some occasionally arrive by expedited couriers, such as UPS and FedEx. I always thought that to be a huge waste of resources. Haven’t book publishers heard of media mail? The post office basically invented the service just for them. Also, this is a book, not a newspaper or a timely document. There’s no way that an extra day or two will “spoil” the content.
- The publisher provides an ebook.
The ebook makes a lot of sense for examination copies. It costs the publisher next to nothing to supply a bunch of interested readers the book. Moreover, it gets to the reader quicker than sending it by expedited courier. And, again, it costs a lot less.
However, most publishers are utterly terrified of unauthorized reproductions. They’re so frightened about it, in fact, that they burden the ebook with DRM that makes the book unreadable. The most common way they do this is by requiring you to use something like Adobe Digital Editions to read the book. That platform, and others like it, basically render the book and its words, into images of the book pages. In effect, you’re not reading, you’re looking at photographs of text. This makes it almost impossible for reading on small-screen devices, such a smartphone, because you can’t resize the text; you can only resize the page. No wonder phones are getting bigger and bigger.
Not only that, you can’t highlight text—only parts of the page. You can’t look up words by tapping or clicking on them because the computer doesn’t see text—it sees images. And, if you want to read somewhere without an Internet connect, such as a subway train or an airplane, you won’t because you can’t print pages or cache the entire book on your device. Bleh!
I don’t know how recording companies handle promotional copies, or whether they even provide them at all anymore. I would think that since the advent of the Internet, iTunes, and other streaming music services, they would provide radio stations with a digital file or some type. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they still shipped plastic disks via Pony Express. But let’s say for argument’s sake that, in the intervening twenty years since I worked at KCSB, the record companies started sending programming and music directors promotional MP3s. If these recording companies followed the footsteps of the book publishers, their digital offerings would be as follows:
The music director would be instructed to download a proprietary listening application specific for that recording company’s group. I suppose that’s one good thing about only three recording groups—Warner Music, Sony, and BMG—existing today. She would then download a version for each of her devices: i.e, personal computer, work computer, smartphone, and iPod-like music player (they *still* exist). The sound quality would be reduced through downsampling, resembling something like FM radio: serviceable, but certainly not optimal. The music could only be heard with a live Internet connection: go into an elevator, and you’re listening to the elevator music in the elevator. And lastly, as a final insult, the app would not allow you to change the volume.
Done Right
Earlier today, the University of California Press offered an examination copy of Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor, edited by two UCSB scholars: Michael Curtin and Kevin Samson. When I saw that I could download an ebook, I was expecting to see the book in Adobe Digital Editions or something similar crappy. Instead, I saw that I could download an EPUB, a PDF, or a MOBI file. Each of these work with different readers, such as Kindle, iBooks, and many other open source applications.
I was further pleased to see the book was not crippled by cumbersome DRM and that it was the entire book for me to examine. Thanks!
This is definitely the way to go, and even if I don’t adopt it, the book will not be abandoned on my desk. And it didn’t cost the publisher anything to send it.
