Tuesday, August 18, 2015

OnHub isn't a Router

Today Google announced an expensive wifi router ($200).  Supposedly "finally a simple router."  Ok.

The correct take on this? An easy-to-update Internet-of-Things bridge, to bridge from ethernet to the various other radio protocols used by door locks, thermostats, security systems, etc.

Monday, August 10, 2015

iOS 9b5 notes

Still a little bit buggy, but getting there.  Some apps that crashed at startup now work for me (in fact, I now have no apps that crash at startup).  Status bar now reappeared in Reeder.

Problems:

  • still a bit laggy.  This is most noticeable when the device thinks I picked it up in landscape and takes its time rotating, in multiple steps, to portrait. Seemingly every time I pick up the phone.
  • Mail is flaky, particularly on my iPad Air 2.  Stray attachment icons floating around the message view, even in messages without attachments (killing mail and restarting solves).
  • Battery usage is a bit high still. Burning about an extra 10-20% of battery in a day, at least on my iPhone 6+.
  • News app still a little slow to show me new materials. Sometimes you have to tap between tabs to get it to load new material.



HTC, HTC, HTC... (This is what happens when the user is not the customer)

HTC stored images of users' fingerprints as world-readable files.  This isn't even the problem.  The real problem is: why were they storing images of fingerprints at all?  If you are going to store them, you had damned well better one-way hash them and store the hashes instead.  In fact, you should only be storing hashes of feature vectors, not of the prints themselves.  You should only ever compare hash-to-hash, not fingerprint-to-fingerprint. You can do this using graph comparison algorithms instead of image comparisons.

Dummies.