Flynixie. I’m not sure that Dick Tracy’s watch could fly, so this is way more awesome.

SNUPI/Wallyhome cuts staff – sad to see a Seattle startup struggle, and these guys have some really interesting technology that has come out of Patel’s work.

But I’ve always thought that remote sensing without video (and to a lesser degree audio) is uninteresting. The first thing you want to do when a remote event is triggered is see exactly what is going on. Without that, remote sensing is just kind of frustrating. I’ve tried Wally and Smartthings and every other kind of remote sensor, the only thing that has stuck is Dropcam because it lets me see what is going on.

It is why cameras and video is at the heart of what we are doing at Surround.io – vision is fundamental, and solving the hard scale issues of video processing, storage and transmission puts you in a great position to deal with other types of sensor data.

Sadly, I am as much a tool as this guy – Money quotes from USA Today:

Perkins says he’s “all in” on Apple products from the iPhone to Apple TV. And, in his line of work, he has to stay abreast of important tech trends.

But the main reason he’s an early adopter of the Apple Watch? “It’s the perfect sports watch,” said Perkins who plans to wear it while jogging. He’ll also wear it the office for the notifications that remind him to get to meetings on time and as a conversation piece.

“I will have that showpiece that everyone wants to see,” Perkins said. “I’ll be that guy for a couple of weeks.”

• Noir by Robert Coover. Noir mystery meets mushrooms. Very strange story. Engaged me but I’m not sure I’d want a steady diet of this.
• The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka. Very nicely written, but ultimately defeated me. My lack of any cricket knowledge and lack of any Sri Lanka knowledge put me in too deep a hole.
• The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith. Excellent pageturner, not surprising, Smith writes engaging tales.
• The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming. Also a great pageturner, for some reason the hunt for moles inside the British intelligence community never gets old.
• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. I enjoyed, kind of an extended Greek tragedy set in rural Wisconsin. With dogs.
• Y: The Last Man by Brian K Vaughan, Pia Guerra, Jose Marzan Jr. I don’t read many graphic novels but this got such great reviews, and it is a great tale. Every male human and male animal dies off suddenly, except for one, and the race is on to save and recreate the world. This would be a fantastic TV show, tho I’d tame down some of the comic parts a little.

I see I can pre-order a Tessel 2 now. Interesting part, it is nice that wifi is built in, and they have the same entry price as the pi, and they seem to be more focused on embedded solutions, with a lot of messaging around pricing and use for embedded. But no GPU on this chip which seems unfortunate, unless I am missing something. And no camera port, usb only. This might or might not be ok, tho part of the RPI’s appeal is the camera port dumping right to GPU ram with no use of the limited usb/io bus.

The Spark Electron is another interesting device, built in low cost cellular plan, which is very nice. I am compelled to trial one just for that. Now this is a much more compute limited device than the others, but a great idea.

If you are into this kind of stuff, we are hiring…

I sold most of my vinyl back in the early 90s, tho I held on to a couple dozen that meant something to me. This artisan turntable from a local shop makes me want to get back into vinyl…

• The Beatle Lyrics, edited by Hunter Davies. Not a terrible addition to the Beatles literature, but not great either. The discussion of the lyrics is not very deep, which might be ok, but the discussion of what was going on with the writers at the time is also thin. Just OK.
• The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt. Fantastic Old West characters, I loved the two brothers. The tale started out strong and kind of petered out, but memorable characters.
• Wool Omnibus Edition by Hugh Howey. OK we don’t really need any more near future post apocalyptic dystopia novels, but this was fun.
• Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears. Well this was twisty and fun. Deception and intrigue across several generations in the 1900s.
• Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. Near future science fiction set in South Africa, not the usual setting for most books available here in US.
• Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson. Someone recommended this as a great YA title, but I thought it was a bit of a mess.
• Unseen by Karin Slaughter. How does this thing get good reviews on Amazon, it is a poorly written mess. Gave up on quickly.
• The Terror of Living by Urban Waite. Smuggling on the Canadian border goes very very wrong.

Neither VLC nor quicktime could play it. Wow, the entire corpus of midi files is lost to me. A day to remember.

I was tipped that GarageBand can handle them. Day saved.

• Different by Youngme Moon. I hate most business books but this one was refreshing. Relatively agjron free, short, and with a clear point of view about how to innovate and stand out.
• Dissolution by C. J. Sansom. Great Tudor era mystery. Very sorry that TV production on this stalled years ago, this would be awesome.
• What If? by Randall Munroe. The perfect bathroom book.

Gstreamer continues to be super useful, although like every open source project, there are a lot of rough edges. Open Frameworks seems like it might be very useful as well. FPM – effing package management, indeed. io.js – wondering if I should jump to, the recent slowness of node.js revs is cause for wonder.

Been an awesome year for football. The unexpected run of the Buckeyes was legendary. And the Seahawks were awesome until that last fateful play last night. What a crushing way to lose.

And now sadly it is all over. March Madness is months away. Time to get some work done.

the latest pi rev is phenomenal. and when you look at where arm procs are heading – wow we are going to have a lot of compute power at the edge. Which makes me happy about what we are doing at Surround.io, we are betting in a big way on edge compute power.

Never rename an xcode project.

And never move a git submodule.

Tempting to do both but you will regret it.

• Miss Pregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs – basically, the X-Men in novel form. X-Men are more exciting tho this isn’t terrible.
• Proxima by Stephen Baxter. Settling new planets isn’t for sissies. Unless you find a magic wormhole.
• The Hour Between Dog and Wolf by John Coates. Our “rational” behaviour is driven by our physical bodies and emotions in ways we are just understanding. Interesting but drags on.
• Orfeo by Richard Powers. A biohacker, a terrorist, or just eccentric? Nicely written.

I bought these because, well, i buy every gadget. But they are useless without widespread adoption. Because I am the only person I know using them, the only time I can locate my tile-tagged items is when I am right next to them running the tile app.

It is great if your product can benefit from a network effect, that is a powerful accelerant. But if your product is useless without a network effect, well, you don’t really have a product.