this-dang-guy

Thanks! Not sure that the tracker is what I'm looking for (or I'd be into the fitbit move), but Asteroid looks intriguing. I'm following both now.

Appreciate the tip!

Wow, I didn't know they ever shipped those things.

No thanks, my stack is big enough, but I betcha someone collects those!

Point me to an F/OSS and Open Hardware version and I'm there. Seriously, I'm always backing those sorts of devices over proprietary ones every chance I get - though it's rare as heck.

Wow, I remember the Treo. That was a device long on promise, short on delivery.

I actually can't think too much about that era without being angry about how all of that sector played out. Frivolous lawsuits, bad management, amazing hardware, flashes of brilliant software.

And hope. So much hope.

Manufacturer: (n) Like an API, but it has even less idea what you're talking about and costs a whole lot more to use

I have an Ouya, an OnLive, a cuecat, a SuperDisk LS-120, Commodore Plus 4, PS Vita (maybe a little early to call, but...), a DivX, a DreamCast, a Jornada, a Palm Tungsten, a GameBoy Advance e-card reader, probably some other stuff in there too.

Shelf is a euphemism, it's actually a small pile of boxes that I keep just to remind myself that even great ideas will die with poor implementation, planning, DRM, or bad support.

I agree entirely. It's very rare that something fits a niche so nicely, while the competition misses it by miles. I have the same feeling about my simple sigma bike computer (though at least there's more options in that niche).

I will use my pebble as long as it continues to work, then it'll get retired to my shelf of tech fails. Most of which failed FAR more spectacularly.

Yes, this added the page to the 'never visit again' list for me.

Especially since they don't even have to be surface mounted. It'd really be nice to be able to trust devices.

Wow, bummer. I wondered what happened to Cyanogen, I was looking forward to their stuff.

I really miss the laptops that had physical switches and the little sliding camera covers.

I'd even settle for a good case that just covers/muffles all of that.

That's what I was thinking. Maybe they're looking for smaller, like that awesome 'gag' flip-phone in Zoolander.

Something that allowed people to step back and evaluate issues realistically, with correct (non-biased/non-skewed) data.

Unfortunately, the best we can do is use stats, studies, and reports. Nothing that's truly free of bias and 100% accurate.

Exactly. Build quality, reliability, etc. Very cheaply made in my experience.

You hit the nail on the head. People always assume my Pebble is just a watch. The absolute best reaction to a smartwatch, IMO.

It's just a watch. That does neat things if I ask it to. Period.

That's what Pebble delivered for me - the watch experience. I didn't want yet another OLED battery sucking device to monitor, I wanted a timex with adjustable features that I could code or change on the fly. If Pebble dies, that's probably what I'll go back to.

Well there you go. It's not a decider for you. But for me, I camp, hunt, hike, fish, and travel constantly.

I spend more often than not 3-4 days away from power in a given week.

I agree. I backed pebble each time on kickstarter, and bought some of them for friends, too.

They are by far and away my favorite smartwatch. The others have just no appeal to me at all.

Fitbit, however, makes awful devices, IMO. I really hope they don't kill the Pebble magic.

I've started to leverage them with fallback, but I guess I'll see how that plays out. (For fonts - I don't use anything else from a CDN, aside from front caching with cloudflare)

For my new site, what I'm doing is a full fallback - local, cdn font, served from my site, then regular font-family fallback.

Not sure if that works properly in China, if it just spins. It might never 'fail' and fall back. I'd need to test that.

Like so: src: local('Slabo 13px'), local('Slabo13px-Regular'), url(https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/slabo13px/v3/B9U01_cNwYDvIHK04hX...) format('woff2'), url(https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/slabo13px/v3/fScGOqovO8xyProgHUR...) format('woff2'), url("/fonts/Slabo13px-Regular.ttf"); }

Reminded me that I forgot to donate to them this quarter :)

That's precisely it.

Advertise to people who are already interested in your type of product in places they may be looking for something new. Games at Gamestop/IGN etc, specific subreddits, books at goodreads, camping/hiking stuff on hiking boards.

So then it depends on hosting country and viewpoint - since mention of Taiwan as an independent country is illegal in China, for example.

My issue is that I see no reason why they need to grab geolocation data from my mobile GPS device (in the TOS).

Plus, they openly acknowledge that they provide any/all info in the event of what they consider 'legally actionable' activity. Which is SUPER vague. So - there's no point in yet another online network that's just like all the other ones.

We cooperate with government and law enforcement officials or private parties to enforce and comply with the law. We may disclose any information about you to government or law enforcement officials or private parties as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate: (i) to respond to claims, legal process (including subpoenas); (ii) to protect our property, rights and safety and the property, rights and safety of a third party or the public in general; and (iii) to stop any activity that we consider illegal or legally actionable activity.

I have backed many things over the years, constantly with lower and lower expectations.

The only 2 products that really surpassed expectations for me were Pebble and Divinity: Original Sin. Everything else has basically been somewhere between a flop and a trainwreck.

I think it is too. We finally killed our campaigns on bing, google, and fb - we go with just a few smaller ads on more targeted platforms... and get 10x the results for 1% of the money.

Still nothing to brag about, but money on adwords is definitely money wasted

Serious question - what's the difference between that, and running all apps in their own chroot jails?

It seems like the goal of this app is to isolate things from the network, and from each other. A web app or chromebook method isolates from other apps, ok, fine, but not from the web. Seems more like jail in that sense.

Maybe I'm just misunderstanding.

It is. Of course, I haven't worked anywhere with onshore coders in quite some time.

I can totally get why if little/no-exp devs are expecting six figure salaries.

Thanks! I think I'll give that a try. That's a great idea.

I think it would an interesting exercise to attempt to build a reasonably modern device that's truly audited and secure head-to-toe.

If it could be done with proper 'design by contract', inspections, and at a cost that folks could swallow, you might have a new Apple 2 on your hands. Not in the corporate world, at least not immediately (where tomorrow's profits outweigh next-week's), but among security cautious folks and researchers.

I'd love to see if a laptop, for example, could be built to that standard. And if built, if it could actually accomplish real (not hobbyist) work. BlacktOPS or something catchy :)

The thing that really scares me, as a fortunately ex-security guy, is the fact that everywhere I've worked for the last 10 years people are super casual about keyboards and mobiles.

Mobile phones are an amazing platform to do... well, almost anything. There are some areas where their possession is restricted, though I suspect a motivated party could sneak a stripped down mobile device into nearly anywhere.

Keyboards, on the other hand. Wow. I've seen even airgapped systems have random keyboards right off the pallet slapped onto them. These sit in racks for months or years, then get tossed usually to a recycler, a donation program, stolen, or just thrown into a dumpster. Considering how much tech is in a keyboard, and how much volume it has, you could place nearly anything in there and possibly go ages without catching on.

A scenario that I recently pointed out as a 'thought exercise' was a refitted USB keyboard with a microphone, pinhole camera, and simple keylogger+screenshot engine that contained an intermittent RF/wifi/bluetooth/ultrasonic network. Programmed to dump its payload whenever an individual passed nearby and triggered it remotely.

Such a trojan could sit in a datacenter or conference room for years completely unnoticed. The data it captured transmitted only to the cleaning crew or whatever.

Worse yet, such a device could also pass instructions to the system it was attached to as an actual USB device.

You could fit a lot of horsepower in an innocuous Dell or MS or whatever mass-produced keyboard. Toss it into a top level conference room for corporate espionage, toss it into a data center for more direct trouble, whatever.

Scary thought, and I think part of why I still use the same keyboard I've had since 1997 ;)

Even the aerospace/defense companies I work with use almost 100% off-the-shelf hardware pre-installed with OS and software by the vendors, or at least with some minimal IT work (often offshore).

I'm happy to hear that there are some smaller fabs and things that are easier to inspect, but I think that the commodity level of most hardware still makes it super unlikely.

If a company is willing to use Office 365 (which I can neither confirm nor deny some very large shops might use, but wouldn't be out of the usual), you cannot seriously expect them to pay proper attention to what their processors are doing.

I would hope that if someone worked in high-clearance, there would be MANY such measures in place. The ease with which a fully loaded laptop can walk out of Los Alamos wouldn't really lend credence to them patching the biggest hole... the people.

You are my favorite form of security guy - the insanely suspicious sort who is always looking for the weakest point. But when it comes right down to it, there's billions of weak points at much higher levels and much more easily compromised than a chipset or compiler. It's a good academic exercise though.