This morning I set up the Cocoon I received this week — “Protect your whole home with Cocoon. Simple setup, HD video and audio, built-in siren, all controlled from your phone. Feel safe with Cocoon.”

Unboxing and setup — pretty standard box quality, nothing special about. Inside the box you get the Cocoon, usb cable and wall wart, some clunky international adapters, a stand, and a very small manual. While the manual was small, it was complete and clear.

For wifi setup the Cocoon uses an audio scheme — the Cocoon app on your phone blurts a song out which the Cocoon listens to for embedded wifi credentials. It was pleasant and fast, and way better than a bluetooth dance or a private wifi hotspot dance. Up and running in minutes, this promise was met.

Apparently the Cocoon will use location services and when it knows you are out of the house (ie when your phone is out of the house), will “arm” itself and start watching for movement and listening for sounds. It will then alert you to anything, and you can connect to see the video snippets, and set off the alarm if you want (or call the police or whatever). I didn’t exhaustively check all this out, I mostly just played with the video.

And, well, video as a data type is hard. So many bits. So opaque. The promised “HD video” was not really HD, was very laggy (my guess is they are using something like HLS or DASH which guarantees lag), was corrupted at times, had a low framerate, sometimes didn’t show up over the LTE connection. I’d say that the Canary I’ve used in the past had better video.

The Cocoon also has some feature called Subsound. I could not tell from the app screen what this was supposed to be doing. The website says it uses an infrasound microphone, geolocation, and machine learning. You can only see the app screen if you are at home. I guess this is to detect a broader array of movement or sound.

So…this is fairly expensive device. But with poor video. And a bag of other features which seem ok but not amazing. The economics on this thing are challenging to justify, if you want to see what’s going on in your home, a raspberry pi based system would be FAR cheaper tho of course you would have to futz with it yourself. The big downfall of this device is the poor video experience, at $400 I expect something pretty freaking amazing.

My best two investments this year have been NVDA and ARMH. NVDA’s been on fire, it was obvious when I attended their GPU Tech Conference that they were going to do very well this year. And Softbank’s play for ARMH has been rewarding.

All the growth in compute usage and capability has moved to non-Intel processor cores — GPU and ARM, both of which are better in different ways for the high growth compute issues of the day. Hard to imagine this changing, I’d expect to see even more GPU migration (or even on to FPGAs).

INTC’s ARM licensing move is a sign that intel is fully accepting the reality here. I am sure Intel still has a lot of internal religion about x86 instruction set — but they shouldn’t hold back now. They should fully cast aside any religion about instruction sets, and just make sure everyone is opting to put an Intel part everywhere. Put an ARM core on every x86 processor — they certainly have the transistors, it would be great as a developer to have an ARM core at my disposal on my laptop. Put an x86 core on every ARM chip, it would be great to be able to use x86 code in more places.

Softbank meanwhile may have just enabled their biggest competitor. It is great to have Intel as a licensee, but there is no way Intel is going to accept a secondary position in the processor market, they are going to use their design skills and fab skills to try to coopt the ARM market. Softbank will need to ramp up their own ARM ecosystem efforts, probably with a deeper software and services play, or they are going to find themselves with less and less influence.

They look pretty cool. I wonder who could help me get in the queue…

Comcast must love our household. We have to be in the top tier of cable subscribers — multiple TVs, all DVRs, the most premium and sports channels we can get. Partly inertia, partly because we have been economically fortunate, partly because I want to get all the live HD football I can get. Comcast marketers must sit around salivating about us and wondering how to create more customers like us (or at least hang on to us).

So why is the Comcast/NBC Olympics coverage the worst possible option for viewing live Olympics? The 100M dash was what finally killed me. CBUT had it live. I could have found it on streaming live. NBC and Comcast in their infinite wisdom showed it at who knows what time last night. NBC had far more important things to show like prelim heats of some 800M race, also probably on tape delay. We found 5 minutes of worthwhile content in the first two hours of NBC Olympic coverage, thank goodness we could fast forward through it all.

By any measure the traditional cable NBC Olympics viewing is the worst possible option, which is so strange given the pile of money I give Comcast each month. The clear message is “If you want to watch live Olympics, you should not choose NBC or a cable subscription”. Comcast why would you treat your best customer this way?

Google has announced Brillo which leverages Android and Linux. But no, wait, now there is Google Fuchsia because apparently Linux isn’t good enough. On the pi there are a jillion variants of linux to use, but with glaring holes (general purpose gpu, docker for instance). ARM has mbed tho it is really targetted at low end devices. You can try Windows 10. And all of these require a lot of laborious tinkering.

To say nothing of the cloud, the services for managing ARM devices are even more nascent or non-existent.

You have to wonder what Softbank is going to do about this. A $32B hardware bet needs a corresponding software and services bet.

UPDATE: Nat reminds me that I didn’t even mention toolchains! Cross-compilers, QEMU, etc — there is so much fun in here!

Congrat’s to Seattle’s Turi, acquired by Apple. And congrats to Nervana and to Brad and Chris at Fuel, in what seems to be a great exit. The markups on ML companies are tremendous — not surprising given the dramatic impact ML is having.

I’d expect to see many more dramatic ML exits.

In this year’s battle of one-off kitchen tools: The SlotDog kind of smashes your hotdog, but it does seem to work, the hotdogs are attractive and tasty. The watermelon slicer is pretty erratic, it mostly just smashes your watermelon and produces a lot of oddly shaped pieces and juice. A sharp knife is a much better tool.

Nat, sharp as ever. One of the reasons we started Surround.io was to take advantage of the Moore’s Law driven wave of sensing technology. Since sensors are just carved out of silicon now, using the same process technology as digital electronics, sensors (cameras, accelerometers, mics, etc) are increasingly ubiquitous, cheap, and powerful. The challenge is software to process the flood of data.

tweets to reboot your thinking around the "camera" in your "phone." all these sensors are riding the silicon curve. https://t.co/LdQ96RiHiH

— Nat Brown (@natbro) August 6, 2016

The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley. A caper set in the sixteenth century as various parties pursue the Shroud of Turin. Protagonist is memorable, humour level is good, overall a fun read.

Lots of blather about this. Two salient observations by Charles and Eric below. As Eric notes, it is impossible to think about launching a startup today without technology from Seattle.

@trengriffin Next time you hear the rhetoric ask the person on the other side to launch their company with no tech from Seattle

— Eric Fleischman (@efleis) August 6, 2016

An update to our geographic analysis of the Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant.

Cloud City indeed. pic.twitter.com/bpbqMDkJbH

— Charles Fitzgerald (@charlesfitz) August 5, 2016

This seems pretty cool — Cold Casting. I don’t really want to work with hot metals, the last time I did that in college metallurgy lab a millions years ago, it was a near disaster. No scars but I remember the day well.

I was asked this recently. I draw from:

• The NYTimes Sunday Book Reviews. I especially enjoy the “By The Book” column, in which a living author talks about what they have read and are reading. Always some things off the beaten path there.
• The LA Times book reviews are useful as well.
• Various prize lists — Hugo, Nebula, Man Booker, Pulitzer, Nobel, Edgar. Tho I have found the Nobel prize winners to be rough rough going.
• Goodreads reviews and Amazon reviews. If a book doesn’t get great consensus reviews (or at least a strong positive rating from a subset of readers), I probably won’t read.
• I have a couple coworkers/friends who are big readers and I listen to their recos, and my college roommate is a voracious and critical reader, and I listen to him. And then anything that a family member recommends, I will consider.

I will read just about any genre with a couple limitations. I find most popular business books to be horrible — 1 or 2 good ideas that are worthy of an article, but nothing worthy of a book. And I do not enjoy farce in any genre, just not my thing.

Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky. 50 islands you will probably never visit, and a little bit of their story. Not your regular atlas, each entry is a little historical vignette about the island — shipwrecks, nuclear tests, settlement, abandonment, hope, loss. Tristan da Cunha really grabbed me for some reason.

• Unruly Places by Alastair Bonnett. The stories behind some of the most unusual and unlikely places on the globe — places belonging to no nation, to many nations, floating, underground, in the sky — and an understanding of the meaning and importance of place.  Enjoyable.  
• The Rook and Stiletto by Daniel O’Malley. Great suspenseful adventure in a world filled with magic —  kind of a grown-up Harry Potter milieu.  The first page grabs you — the protagonist awakens with no memory, in a park surrounded by bodies, and in her pocket is a note that says “Read Me”. Stiletto isn’t quite as strong but still a fund read.  
• Dispatches From Pluto by Richard Grant. An English adventure writer decides to settle in the Mississippi Delta. Interesting look at the culture and issues of a part of the country that seems almost foreign to me.  
• The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. A different kind of post-apocalyptic novel, the world has largely been emptied out, a very few people try to find their way and remain human.  
• A Strangeness In My Mind by Orhan Pamuk. Tried to lift my literary sights, but as always, “Nobel Prize Winning” does not equal “interesting”.  
• Niceville by Carsten Stroud. Not a nice place. Solid horror/mystery.  

Too much fuss to install today but want to try — https://github.com/shagabutdinov/sublime-enhanced/blob/master/readme-installation.md

Particle — https://console.particle.io/login, AWS — https://aws.amazon.com/iot/, Resin — https://resin.io/ — wonder which of these are most cost effective.

• The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemison. A small set of related characters finding their way on a far-future(?) Earth peopled by humans and human derivatives, littered with the artifacts of past civilizations, undergoing yet another seismic/volcanic reshaping. Of course there is some conspiracy at work. Good tale, characters dealing with painful issues.
• Connectography by Parag Khanna. How the world is moving beyond nation-states to clusters driven by interconnectivity. Well written and a lot of maps, and I am a sucker for maps.
• The Ruins of Gorlan by John A. Flanagan. Pretty standard YA fantasy, but fun nevertheless. I’d read more.
• The Call by Yannick Murphy. Eh, what started out as a clever structural gadget became tiring. I am a little curious to know what happens to the family but I gave up.
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. I like Atkinson, but this book also became tiresome, tho I managed to finish. But I’d recommend a different Atkinson.
• Farthing by Jo Walton. How did I miss this? Conspiracy, murder in the English countryside in an alternative history where Britain made peace with the Nazis. Excellent.
• Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta. A boy witnesses a murder, and, well, shit happens. Fun but not memorable.

• Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume. Highly praised, but it felt to me like the author was trying very hard to be literary. I stuck with it, but it didn’t really move me.
• Uprooted by Naomi Novik. A captivating tale of a young witch coming of age and getting drawn into an existential threat for her homeland. Really loved it, deserves the accolades.
• Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty. Completely fun story of conflicts between parents at a preschool, hilarious but serious. Apparently coming to HBO, this will be fun
• A Burglar’s Guide To The City by Geoff Manaugh. A look at how burglars use urban design and building design to achieve their goals. Would have been even better with more anecdotes, but still interesting

• High-Rise by J. G. Ballard. The community in a modern high-rise starts to fall apart in “Lord of the Flies” fashion…actually “Lord of the Flies” seems pretty tame after this.
• The Travelers by Chris Pavone. A travel writer is coopted and stumbles into a job as a spy, and slowly learns that nothing is as it seems in his life. Fun.
• The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook. No surprise here, pop music is largely a manufactured product.
• The Whites by Richard Price. Couldn’t finish. Supposedly a gritty police drama but kind of dull.
• Electric Barracuda by Tim Dorsey. I generally don’t like farce, but there is something endearing about this character — a wise-cracking serial killer with a heart of gold.

• I Am Not A Serial Killer by John Cleaver. A teenager obsessed with his own psychoses discovers that there are much worse things going on in his town.
• The Rosie Project by Graeme Simpson. Very engaging tale of a man with Asperger’s who fights to build a life for himself. Very enjoyable.
• Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell. A pleasant family visit by out-of-town cousins results in darker turns and secrets unearthed. Quite good.
• Orphan X by Gregg Hurtwitz. An orphan is raised by a secret agency to be a ruthless operative. Just like me.
• Shaker by Scott Frank. A hitman arrives in a post-quake LA to take care of business, and things go south. Not really sure why the quake mattered to the story.
• Great Topics of the World by Albert Goldbarth. Wow this is a meaty meaty book, very demanding, but fascinating. The first essay alone is worth it.