Kyle Seth Gray

I had the amazing opportunity to interview with The Sweet Setup featuring my home 'desk', and the homescreen on my iPhone. It was a fun piece to write, and I was able to highlight apps that I use every day as a college student and web developer.

You can read it here.

One thing I did forget to mention in this post is a great applet for OS X called ClipMenu. ClipMenu is great when you're dealing with text all day, be it snippets of code, links, or typing out prose and blog posts. Having the ability to copy multiple things and have a running history of everything you copy and cut is a priceless tool that I can't believe is free.

Owen Williams wrote a great post today about Push Notifications in the always connected world we live in:

When you install a new app, the first thing it’ll do is ask you to allow push notifications even though you have no idea what to expect! We just met! Why are app makers making such a big request, like it’s no big deal? How will I know what you are going to send me?

Push notifications are one of the best things about our phones. The instant someone mentions us on Twitter, we know. Our phones light up the instant a earthquake happens, the president is elected, or someone likes our photo on Instagram.

It's turned into one of those situations where you ask yourself "What do you want to do with this power?" Owen makes a great point in saying how you should limit your notifications:

When trimming down your notifications, ask yourself these questions:

Am I willing to let this interrupt me at any given moment during my day? Is this information critical to my life?
If the answer is no, kill it. Turn it off entirely.

This encouraged me to just go through and turn off notifications for apps that don't need notifications, or even some that never used them at all.

I’ve never personally seen the need to have Instagram notifications on except for getting a message on there, (which I never do) or someone tagging me in a photo. Thankfully Instagram allows this type of notification control inside the app, but a lot of apps don’t. But there are a slew of other apps that'll notify you about some sale or bug you to play their game again. Not only is it exhaustive and annoying, but it interrupts your day, whatever you may be doing, and kills your battery life.

There are a lot of apps that don’t need our constant attention. Check them when you need to, not when the app wants you to.

As a side note, this is something I also do with Background App Refresh. Introduced in iOS 7, this is a simple thing that allows apps to fetch information in the background so you don’t have to wait for it to load. But do you really need Instagram, Vine, or every single weather app to update in the background? I’ve turned off the majority of apps that seem to request this, and I like to think it’s helped my battery a lot more than having all 33 apps that requested it turned on.

I don't know what it is about carriers, but there seems to be a job description somewhere that says “must be able to make a website that is difficult, has 20 steps, coded with inline javascript and php, and must have a 94% failure rate”. Websites all over always have some dumb loading spinner overlaid on a site, along with weird button elements that just make things difficult. These sites never like to load right, and sometimes have the dumbest plugins, like still requiring flash in 2014.

One of the simplest things ever should be adding a phone to your cell phone plan, right? After all, you’re just giving more money to your carrier. It should just be a straightforward process.

Wrong.

Over the past weekend, my dad upgraded his iPhone 4 to an iPhone 6 (Finally). In doing so, he still has an old, fully functional iPhone 4 that really isn’t worth much in resale value. So he wanted to give it to my little brother to just use as a normal phone. Seems relatively simple. [Note, my family is in Arizona, I’m up in Utah at the moment.]

So I go to Verizon’s online store to go through the process of adding a new phone to my family’s plan for them. First you have to hunt down the button to actually add a device. Then, after you tell it repeatedly that you don’t want to buy a new device, it brings you to a page allowing you to use an old device that was previously on the plan. Thankfully I didn’t have to enter the IMEI for the iPhone again, so points to them on that. But then come the checkout process.

First Verizon brags a few times about their awesome shipping, how it’s free, and how, if you want, you can upgrade to expedited shipping. Sure! Great! I can’t wait to ship my iPhone that’s sitting right next to me to my house. Splendid.

After this mess, Verizon wants to make sure you accessorize your phone. Do you want more charges? What about another case?

Again. We already have the phone. and a few years worth of accessories. Yet Verizon sees the need to capitalize on the fact that you’re activating a new phone to selling you more accessories for this phone.

Finally, after not really getting a hint of whether or not you’re actually getting a new phone number for this phone, they bring you to a screen that allows you to select… the first three digits (after the area code) of your phone. Why not let us select the whole number?

Then, after all these wonderful steps, you finally get to check out. Again, me and my dad are both wondering and hoping that we are actually activating this as a new phone, rather than reactivating it under my dads phone number. They barely made it clear that we actually are getting a new phone number. Regardless, we finally get to the plan screen.

“Please select which money mongering option fits best with your needs”. How about just add it to the plan? There’s no need for more data, we don’t need a weird plan. And why am I paying $40 for access to the data plan? Seems like an arbitrary number.

Then the kicker: “Your total, for activating your phone that has been activated before, used our network before, and isn’t even being transferred from a different carrier or account: $35 for activation fee.”

How is this kind of crap still going on? Why is there an activation fee? Especially when the phone didn’t even activate for another 2ish hours? You’d think that a fee for activating would at least speed up the process.

I wish I had taken some screenshots throughout this whole process, but it’s just laughable how complicated this has gotten, and how much money the carrier is simply taking from you because they can. Sure, yes, they have huge infrastructure to maintain and a lot of that isn’t cheap at all. But there should simply be a three step process to activating a new phone:

1. Choose the Phone you want to activate/Enter the IMEI
2. Choose your data plan.
3. Choose your new phone number.

Voila! You have a new phone. Here’s an explanation of what you ordered, in plain terms, and when you should expect your phone to be activated.

Is it that hard Verizon?

Extra bonus: my notes when I thought "I should write about how terrible this is."

One of the things I continue to be baffled by recently is regular users and their attitude towards security. There are people like us, who use things such as 1Password, Touch ID, 2-Step verification, all to make sure our content online, on our phones or computers, stay safe. We use FileVault to encrypt our harddrives, use apps that have Touch ID authentication, and never use the same password anywhere. We all have family or friends however, that don't use a passcode on their phone and just seem to not care. And when we try to encourage them to "use this awesome $35 super secure app so you don't have to memorize your passwords or have anything compromised", they shrug it off as a trouble not worthy of their time.

Security and hacking almost seems to be such a hassle, and no one cares about until they actually get their data stolen. It's interesting to view this from an outside perspective when I am one of those people that knows only a handful of my passwords by heart. Even then, those passwords are crazy generated ones from iCloud keychain and 1Password.

It's difficult to get into the minds of these people and convince them that taking a few extra minutes to set up a passcode, and a few extra seconds to enter said passcode, is a reliable and useful tool when dealing with your devices. Heck, I've seen people with an iPhone 6 that don't have Touch ID, or any passcode, enabled on the phone. And Touch ID has become so lightning quick that I don't even think about it. It's one of the selling features of the iPhone 6, featured prominently by Apple in the stores, and when you set up the darn thing, yet users just see it as a strange inconvenience.

Despite encouragement, marketing, and various other promotions by companies after events like Heartbleed, or whatever retailer is being hacked this week, it just boils down to users not wanting to take those few extra steps to lock down their information. Why make it so I have to wait for a text message from Google to login to my Gmail account when mypuppysname2012 works just fine?

Security just isn't their thing.

Casey Liss:

A school outside Boston has installed “active shooter” technology, which can detect the presence and location of gunfire...

The technology was apparently developed for the military and is sold by the appropriately-named Shooter Detection Systems.

I find it absolutely stupefying that we’ve gotten to this point.

I agree with Casey here: it is absolutely ridiculous to get to a point where we have to use military grade systems to prevent school shootings, like they're some kind of completely common occurence. It should not have to be like this at all.

School shootings should not be listed alongside earthquakes and fires (As it is at my college) as a common disaster that could possibly happen to you while attending.

"No we don't have a gun control problem, not one bit."

One of the most entertaining things is seeing someone who may be somewhat out of touch, or whose account is being run by a media team, tweeting something way out of line on Twitter.

That happened today with all the buzz surrounding Obama's plan for an open Internet (basically his little statement on Net Neutrality). Senator Ted Cruz from Texas had an interesting thing to say:

"Net Neutrality" is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.

— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) November 10, 2014

Politicians...

Meanwhile, The Oatmeal had a pretty fun response to this tweet:

Dear Senator Ted Cruz,

[Your tweet this morning] led me to assume one of two things:

Thing #1: When accepted campaign funds from telecom lobbyists last year, they asked that you publicly smear Net Neutrality.

Thing #2: You don't actually know what Net Neutrality is.

Politicians apparently love making statements that are just whatever helps them, or confuses their voters to blindly follow their "leadership". I'm not going to go into the politics of anything in this, but outright saying something like this, that doesn't make sense in the first place, is completely wrong and stupid. Yet these people are representing us in the Senate.

Yay America?