Latest Posts (12 found)
Herman's blog 2 days ago

Smartphones and being present

I read an article yesterday, stating that on average, people spend 4 hours and 37 minutes on their phones per day 1 , with South Africans coming in fourth highest in the world at a whopping 5 hours and 11 minutes 2 . This figure seems really high to me. If we assume people sleep roughly 8 hours per day, that means that one third of their day is spent on their phones. If we also assume people work 8 hours per day (ignoring the fact that they may be using their phones during work hours), that suggests that people spend over half of their free time (and up to 65% of it) glued to their screens. I never wanted to carry the internet around in my pocket. It's too distracting and pulls me out of the present moment, fracturing my attention. I've tried switching to old-school black and white phones before, but always begrudgingly returned to using a smartphone due to the utility of it. The problem, however, is that it comes with too many attention sinks tucked in alongside the useful tools. I care about living an intentional and meaningful life, nurturing relationships, having nuanced conversations, and enjoying the world around me. I don't want to spend this limited time I have on earth watching short form video and getting into arguments on Twitter. This is what I enjoy. Picture taken yesterday in Scarborough, South Africa. I've written at length about how I manage my digital consumption, from turning off notifications to forgoing social media entirely . The underlying premise here is that if you're trying to lose weight, you shouldn't carry cookies around in your pockets. And my phone is the bag of cookies in this metaphor. We're wired to seek out distraction, novel information, and entertainment, and avoid boredom at all costs. But boredom is where creativity and self-reflection do their best work. It's why "all the best ideas come when you're in the shower"—we don't usually take our phones with us into the shower (yet). According to Screen Time on my iPhone, on average I spend 30 minutes per day on it, which I think is reasonable, especially considering the most-used apps are by-and-large utility apps like banking and messages. This isn't because I have more self-control than other people. I don't think I do. It's because I know myself, and have set up my digital life to be a positive force, and not an uninspired time-sink. There are many apps and systems to incentivise better relationships with our phones, mostly based around time limits. But these are flawed in three ways: The only way I've found to have a good relationship with my phone is to make it as uninteresting as possible. The first way is to not have recommendation media (think Instagram, TikTok, and all the rest). I'm pro deleting these accounts completely, because it's really easy to re-download the apps on a whim, or visit them in-browser. However some people have found that having them on a dedicated device works by isolating those activities. Something like a tablet at home that is "the only place you're allowed to use Instagram". I can't comment too much on this route, but it seems reasonable. My biggest time sink over the past few years has been YouTube. The algorithm knew me too well and would recommend video after engaging, but ultimately useless video. I could easily burn an entire evening watching absolute junk—leaving me feeling like I'd just wasted what could have otherwise been a beautiful sunset or a tasty home-cooked lasagne. However, at the beginning of this year I learnt that you can turn off your YouTube watch history entirely, which means no recommendations. Here's what my YouTube home screen now looks like: Without the recommendations I very quickly run out of things to watch from the channels I'm subscribed to. It's completely changed my relationship with YouTube since I only watch the videos I actually want to watch, and none of the attention traps. You can turn off your YouTube watch history here , and auto delete your other Google history (like historic searches and navigation) here , which I think is just good practice. I also used my adblocker, AdGuard on Safari which has a useful "block element" feature, to block the recommended videos on the right of YouTube videos. I use this feature to hide shorts as well, since I have no interest in watching them either, and YouTube intentionally makes them impossible to remove. If you're interested in a similar setup, here are the selectors I use to block those elements: The only media that I do sometimes consume on my phone are my RSS feeds, but it's something I'm completely comfortable with since it's explicitly opt-in by design and low volume. While I still have the twitch to check my phone when I'm waiting for a coffee, or in-between activities—because my brain's reward system has been trained to do this—I'm now rewarded with nothing. Over time, I find myself checking my phone less and less. Sometimes I notice the urge, and just let it go, instead focusing on the here and now. I think that while the attention-span-degrading effects of recommendation media are getting most of the headlines, what isn't spoken about as much is the sheer number of hours lost globally to our phones (3.8 million years per day, according to my back-of-the-napkin-math). And while people may argue that this could involve productive work or enjoyable leisure, I suspect that the vast (vast!) majority of that time is short-form entertainment. My solution may sound overkill to many people, but I can say with absolute certainty that it has turned me into a more present, less distracted, and more optimistic person. I have much more time to spend in nature, with friends, or on my hobbies and projects. I can't imagine trading it in for a tiny screen, ever. Give it a try. Happily on the beach for sunset. I'm an adult, I know how to circumvent these limits, and I will if motivation is low. Time limits don't affect the underlying addiction. You don't quit smoking by only smoking certain hours of the day. The companies that build these apps have tens of thousands of really smart people (and billions of dollars) trying to get me hooked and keep me engaged. The only way to win this game isn't by trying to beat them (I certainly can't), but by not playing.

ai AI programming Programming mobile Mobile
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Herman's blog 1 weeks ago

PIRACYKILLS

Most people who read my blog and know me for the development of Bear Blog are surprised to learn that I have another software project in the art and design space. It's called JustSketchMe and is a 3D modelling tool for artists to conceptualise their artwork before putting pencil to paper. It's a very niche tool (and requires some serious explanation to some non-illustrators involving a wooden mannequin and me doing some dramatic poses), however when provided as a freemium tool to the global population of artists, it's quite well used. Similar to Bear, I make it free to everyone, with the development being funded through a "pro" tier. Conversely, since it is a standalone app it has a bit of a weakness, which is what this post is about. I noticed, back in 2021, that when Googling "justsketchme" the top 3 autocompletes were "justsketchme crack", "justsketchme pro cracked", and "justsketchme apk". On writing this post, I checked that this still holds true, and it's fairly similar 4 years later. The meaning of this is obvious. A lot of people are trying to pirate JustSketchMe. However, instead of feeling frustrated (okay, I did feel a bit frustrated at first) I had a bright idea to turn this apparent negative into a positive. I created two pages with the following titles and the appropriate subtitles to get indexed as a pirate-able version of JustSketchMe: These pages rank as the first result on Google for the relevant search terms. Then on the page itself I tongue-in-cheek call out the potential pirate. I then acknowledge that we're in financially trying times and give them a discount code. And you know what? That discount code is the most used discount code on JustSketchMe! By far! No YouTube sponsor, nor Black Friday special even comes close. In some ways this is taking advantage of a good search term. In others it's showing empathy and adding delight, creating a positive incentive to purchase to someone who otherwise wouldn't have. The discount code is PIRACYKILLS . I'll leave it active for a while. 👮🏻‍♂️ JustSketchMe Crack Full 2021 22.0.1.73 JustSketchMe APK Mirror FULL 2.2.2021

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Herman's blog 3 weeks ago

Miscellaneous updates

Hi everyone, Just some updates about upcoming travel and events; responses to the recent post about social media platforms; and some thoughts about the Bear license update. I'll be heading to Istanbul next week for Microconf , which is a yearly conference where non-venture track founders get together, explore a new city, and learn from one another. I had meant to go to the one last year in Croatia, but had just gotten back from two months in Vietnam, and the thought of travelling again so soon felt daunting. I've made two Bear t-shirts for the conference. One light and one dark mode—inspired by the default Bear theme. Let's see if anyone notices! If you live in Istanbul and want to grab coffee, I'm keen! If you've previously travelled to Istanbul and have recommendations for me, please pop me an email. I have a few days to explore the city.

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Herman's blog 4 weeks ago

Slow social media

People often assume that I hate social media. And they'd be forgiven for believing that, since I am overtly critical of current social media platforms and the effects they have on individuals and society; and deleted all of my social media accounts back in 2019 . However, the underlying concept of social media is something I resonate with: Stay connected with the people you care about. It's just that the current form of social media is bastardised, and not social at all. Instead of improving relationships and fostering connection, they're advertisement-funded content mills which are explicitly designed and continually refined to keep you engaged, lonely, and unhappy. And once TikTok figured out that short-form video with a recommendation engine is digital crack, all other social media platforms quickly sprang into action to copy their secret sauce. Meta basically turned Instagram and Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content'. Even Pinterest is starting to look like TikTok! They followed user engagement, but not the underlying preferences of their users. I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time. I don't think most people using these platforms understand that they are the product. Instagram isn't built for you. It's built for marketers. It's built for celebrities to capitalise on their audiences. It's built for politicians and their cronies to sway sentiment. It's built to be as addictive as possible, and to capitalise on your insecurity and uncomfortability.

culture Culture media Media programming Programming
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Herman's blog 1 months ago

If Apple cared about privacy

If you're not aware yet, in 2022 Alphabet paid Apple $20 billion for Google to be the default search engine on Apple devices, according to unsealed court documents in the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google. This is because defaults matter . The vast majority of people use the default search engine/browser/maps/setup that a devices comes standard with. They also just live with the default notification settings, which I've written about before in an essay on digital hygiene . Say what you will about Apple, but they do care about user experience more than the other big tech companies. This is mostly because the value-exchange with Apple is clear: You give them money, and in return they give you good hardware and software, and a commitment to privacy. With Google this relationship is more nebulous. Google gives you a free search engine, free email, free document editing and storage, a free browser, free maps, and a bunch of other useful services; but the money comes from...elsewhere. It comes from influencing your buying decisions, and selling your data and attention to marketers; along with a whole host of privacy and security infringements along the way. I understand why Google paid Apple all that money. Not only does it send lots of high value traffic to Google, but it also disincentivises Apple from creating their own search engine and competing with Google in this space. Yet Apple is also the company that runs ads like this:

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Herman's blog 1 months ago

Bear is now source-available

When I started building Bear I made the code available under an MIT license . I didn't give it much thought at the time, but knew that I wanted the code to be available for people to learn from, and to make it easily auditable so users could validate claims I have made about the privacy and security of the platform. Unfortunately over the years there have been cases of people forking the project in the attempt to set up a competing service. And it hurts. It hurts to see something you've worked so hard on for so long get copied and distributed with only a few hours of modification. It hurts to have poured so much love into a piece of software to see it turned against you and threaten your livelihood. It hurts to believe in open-source and then be bitten by it. After the last instance of this I have come to the difficult decision to change Bear's license from MIT to a version of copyleft based on the Elastic License. This new license is almost identical to the MIT license but with the stipulation that the software cannot be provided as a hosted or managed service. Everything else is still permitted. You can view the specific wording here . After spending time researching how other projects are handling this, I realise I'm not alone. Many other open-source projects have updated their licenses to prevent "free-ride competition" in the past few years. 1 2 3 4 5 6

open-source Open Source programming Programming
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Herman's blog 1 months ago

The ROI of exercise

I workout 4 days a week and I love it. It's the foundation of my morning routine, following spending 45 minutes drinking coffee on the couch and watching the sun come up with Emma. I've been doing this for a few years now and while I struggled (as everyone does) in the beginning, I can't imagine not exercising in the morning now. On the rare occasion that I do skip a workout, I feel it missing throughout the day as a lack of vitality and less mental clarity. Let's perform a thought experiment to work out the return on investment of exercise. For this let's first assume that exercise does nothing else but expand your lifespan (not extend; since it's not just adding frail years to the end but instead injects extra years in each stage of life). We can ignore the effects it has on strength, focus, feelings of accomplishment, and mental health for now. It's well understood that a good exercise routine is a mixture of strength, mobility, and cardio; and is performed at a decent intensity for 2-4 days a week for at least 45 minutes. This could be a combination of weight lifting, yoga, running, tennis, hiking, or whatever floats your boat. This totals about 3 hours a week, or 156 hours per year. If we extrapolate that over an adult lifetime, that's about 8,500 hours of exercise, or about a year of solid physical activity.

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Herman's blog 2 months ago

Digital hygiene: Passwords

This is part 3 of a 3 part series on digital hygiene. I suggest starting at part 1 . Whenever I watch heist movies, I always roll my eyes at the "hacker" character. They can consistently hack building's camera system; or download the contents of a target's phone for use later in the heist. They also manage to hack the bank, which questions the need for a heist in the first place. While there are real-world programatic attack vectors that can be exploited, they're generally opportunistic. When a new vulnerability has been discovered, nefarious actors try to exploit it at scale before it’s patched. The chances of finding and executing a "hack" on the spot (via bluetooth or something equally ridiculous) is highly unlikely. Although, I digress. The most common vulnerability is significantly more boring. It's compromised passwords. These can be stolen through social engineering, like phishing, that exposes account details; but it's also likely exposed through a data leak, where a service hasn't stored passwords securely, and thousands of email+password pairs are stolen. These authentication details are then systematically tested on a bunch of other services in the hopes that some people have re-used their passwords, and thereby gain control over those accounts. And that brings me to the topic of today's post: Password hygiene.

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Herman's blog 2 months ago

Digital hygiene: Notifications

This is part 2 of a 3 part series on digital hygiene. I suggest starting at part 1 . Over the past few years I've cultivated a decent relationship with my phone. Not a good one, mind you, but one I'm fairly comfortable with. There is a part of me that yearns for a return to simple, black-and-white phones, with Internet access limited to whichever room in the house had the phone line and computer. But there's no going back; and so I had to find a way to live with the Internet (and the hyper-connectivity it entails) in my pocket. Developing a good relationship to your phone is an intentional process. It doesn't happen by accident. All apps and media, by design, are fighting for your attention. I've heard the term "attention economy" thrown around, and I feel like it's an apt description of the battle for our increasingly fractured attentions. And the easiest way to grab your attention is via notifications. Sometimes I see a person's phone covered in notifications and I get anxiety-by-proxy. Red badges in the triple-digits; the notification bar an endless list of banners, messages, friend requests, and marketing content. I can't imagine this is a pleasant experience, but it seems to be the norm.

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Herman's blog 3 months ago

Digital hygiene: Emails

This is part 1 of a 3 (or 4, I haven't decided yet) part series on digital hygiene. Email is, arguably, the backbone of the modern internet. Not only is it a means of communication, but is the de-facto identity for operating online. In this way, email isn't just how I communicate, but who I am online. Yes, some services still operate with usernames and passwords; but the vast majority of services use email as user identity. This arguably makes email the most important online account. Everything else relies on email. Email is also where I do most of my work. From technical support, to replying to friendly emails, to receiving invoices; it is the workspace through which my occupation operates. And for all of these reasons, my email is well organised and easy to use. People regularly comment on how quickly and personally I respond to their emails, and it's because they're generally only one of a few emails in my inbox. This isn't because I just naturally don't receive emails (I run two B2C web-services!). Instead it is because I am very active in maintaining a clean workspace. In the same way a carpenter keeps his tools neat and tidy; or a barista cleans his equipment and the counter after every coffee brewed; I put away my emails and wipe down my inbox after every use. What's fairly interesting, though, is that people assume this is difficult. But it's not. Once I started keeping a clean inbox I actually had significantly less work, since every email I received actually warranted attention. The important ones weren't buried beneath a heap of newsletters, spam, receipts, and all the other cruft that can clog up the workspace.

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Herman's blog 4 months ago

Nerding out about heaters

The weather in Cape Town is slowly descending into a cold, wet winter (except for today, which is a beautiful). I've brought the heater up from the garage, doubled up the duvets on the bed, and have started wearing long pyjamas to sleep. Generally at this time of year Emma and I are making plans to head somewhere warm, but this year we've decided to stick it out in South Africa with a month-long road-trip to the North West for some proper time in the bushveld, and then a wedding in Joburg. For people not from South Africa, it does get cold here. Not in the same way it gets cold in Canada or Northern Europe, but in some ways it gets colder. Let me explain: In Canada the Canadians know that it's going to get very, very cold. Unbelievably cold. Because of this they do a whole bunch of reasonable things like insulate their homes, ensure they have a robust heating system, and purchase proper winter attire. But not in South Africa. Our weather is great most of the year, with only about 2 to 3 months of cold weather. It can get down to 5 degrees Celcius on a cold day; and while that may not seem cold to people where the weather gets to -20, we're always completely unprepared for it. Because of our good weather the rest of the year, we forget. We forget to insulate our houses. We forget to get winter sheets. And so when the time comes even the insides of our homes are cold.

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Herman's blog 6 months ago

Yes, I will have coffee with you

Every now and then a reader of my blog finds themselves in Cape Town and reaches out to me to ask for recommendations, or grab a coffee, or just say hi. And I love it. It's opened up a new avenue for meeting interesting people and potential friends. I'm quite far away from my reader-base, which tends to be predominately in the US, Western Europe, and South East Asia. So this happens very infrequently, but when it does, you can be sure that I'm keen. There's also the secondary benefit of meeting people who use Bear Blog: It gives me an opportunity to solicit feedback, get a general vibe of what works and what doesn't, and to keep a finger on the pulse of the project. It allows me to talk shop with someone who understands what it is I do. One of the downsides of being working solo is that it can get occupationally lonely. My friends know what Bear is, but very few people actively blog. So with all that being said, this post is an open-invitation. If you're in Cape Town, either living here or passing through: Yes. I will have coffee with you.

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