sg77.org

VanMoof declares bankruptcy

Scott Graham

VanMoof — the independent e-bike maker that once bragged about being the “most funded e-bike company in the world” — has been declared bankrupt in the Netherlands.

This is disappointing but, to me, not surprising. In February 2017 I spent £2863 on a VanMoof Electrified S. It was (and is) a significant amount of money to spend on a bicycle, even an electric one. I bought it because it looks great and reviews were calling it 'the best pedal-assisted electric bike available'. I had recently moved a new house in a considerably hillier area and had found I wasn't riding my trusty Genesis Croix De Fer 10 as much.

Yes, it was expensive, but I was eagerly looking forward to the arrival of my new electric assisted bicycle. However within a month I had sent it back to VanMoof.

There were a number of problems. Firstly, the bike used a hub motor in the front wheel. But when you ride a bike, the majority of your weight is over the back wheel making traction a bit of an issue. Especially in Scotland where weather isn't always perfect.

Secondly the software controlling the bike crashed numerous times. There were a number of different software bugs I experienced. The bike had a lock which was managed from an app on a smartphone. To use the bike, you had to unlock the bike and then turn on the motor. At times, the app wouldn't connect to the remote servers meaning I couldn't unlock the bike or turn it on. At other times bugs just turned the bike off and wouldn't let it turn on again. All bugs were resolved by plugging it into power and resetting it, but that's not ideal if you're out on a ride and far from home.

I was promised over the air updates were coming which would solve my problems.

However before the software fix arrived, the software crashed again, this time killing all power to the hub motor. And unfortunately I was cycling at a reasonable speed on the road when this happened. When you're on a bicycle with a hub motor which is assisting you and then that assistance is immediately cut off, it feels like someone has stuck a stick in the spokes of your front wheel. Or, at least, that's what it felt like to me.

I was, none too gracefully, ejected from the bicycle landing pretty badly on the road. Thankfully there was no traffic behind me at the time. I know I picked the bike up and walked it the remaining half mile to work, but I have no recollection of that. Visiting the hospital later I found out that I had a pretty bad concussion, broken my shoulder in two places and had multiple scrapes and bruises. The doctor looking at my head scan was pretty sure that without my helmet, I would have had serious head injuries or worse.

I reported the incident to VanMoof and then immediately arranged collection of the bike and a full refund.

I'm sure than in the five years since then, their bikes and software improved (but maybe not). In general, reviews continued to be extremely positive and other than my own incident didn't hear much in the way of negative stories.

But it ensured I would never buy a hub powered electric assist bike again, nor a bike which relied on connectivity with a third party server to use. On that note, if you have a VanMoof bike, please download the Bikey App from Cowboy to ensure you can continue to use your bike after the VanMoof servers are turned off.

Today I am riding an electric assist bike. But it's not 'smart', has a step through frame (because I'm getting old and was struggling swinging my leg over a crossbar) and doesn't use a hub motor, instead using a mid-drive motor from Bosch. And so far, it's not tried to kill me.

Touching moment chimp sees outdoors for the first time

Scott Graham

This made my morning.

Vanilla, a 28-year-old chimpanzee, had never been outside of a cage or enclosure. She is one of the surviving chimps from the New York-based Laboratory for Experimental Medicine & Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP). Vanilla and her sister, Shake, have a new island home at Save the Chimps in Fort Pierce, Florida.

DPReview purchased by Gear Patrol

Scott Graham

A quick follow up to my post from the end of March, which lamented the shuttering of photography website DPReview. Scott Everett, the General Manager of DPReview has posted that DPReview has been acquired by Gear Patrol. And the important bit

"The site will continue to operate as it was before, with all editorial coverage and site features remaining the same, and all historical content accessible."

Great news.

Reddit going the Twitter route

Scott Graham

Christian Selig (developer of Apollo App for browsing Reddit) has said:

June 30th will be Apollo’s last day. I’ve talked to a lot of people, and come to terms with this over the last weeks as talks with Reddit have deteriorated to an ugly point.

The problem isn't (and has never been) that companies running APIs want to be compensated. That’s perfectly fair and as someone who manages servers and creates software, it’s understandable that both the costs of the equipment and engineering time for the software needs to be covered.

The problem is two-fold.

Announcing an unrealistic pricing structure without adequate time for a developer to properly adapt and essentially bankrupting them - Selig says he’ll lose $250,000 in the shutdown.
Lying about their reasons. Thankfully Selig has recordings and can hopefully get some damages from them.

So, June 30th will be my last day as a registered Reddit user. I’ll be deleting my account, just as I did with Facebook and Twitter. Doubtless I’ll still end up on the site from Google searches and links, but I won’t be logged in.

Spoiler Alert: The Daily Mail is awful

Scott Graham

There are TV shows that I watch on my own. There are TV shows my partner watches without me. But there are some TV shows we watch together. One of those shows is Succession. Succession, for the uninitiated, follows Logan Roy (not so subtly based on Rupert Murdoch) and his family as they battle for control of Roy's media empire and fortune. Every character is awful, they have no redeeming qualities and the whole thing is ridiculous and incredibly entertaining.

In the UK, I believe Succession airs on a Monday evening. I say believe because I'm not 100% sure. We never see it as it's broadcast, instead watching it on catch up, later in the week at a point which suits us both - it's normally on a Wednesday or Thursday evening. And apparently that gap is long enough to allow a major plot point to be spoiled by a national 'newspaper'.

The Daily Mail - a right wing, sensationalist newspaper which is so corrupt it's been banned as a source on Wikipedia - decided that a spoiler for that week's episode should be posted on the upper third of the front page of Wednesday's copy. Had it been on the inside pages, I'd never have known and wouldn't care. But because it's on the front page, it's kind of hard to avoid if you watch the round up of the following day's front pages on the news, glance through the BBC papers section or just walk into a shop selling newspapers.

There are certain things I watch which I know will be spoiled by websites. I tend to ignore my RSS reader, and the geekier side of the web until I'm caught up on The Mandalorian, Andor or whichever Marvel series is currently running. But I didn't expect to have to ignore the BBC News website or not walk into any shops which sell newspapers.

In the grand scheme of things, this is nothing. I understand that. In fact, the main story on that day's copy is worth far more condemnation than the spoiling of a TV show. But it's the malicious deliberateness of this which is angering me. It isn't news. It's not going to sell more copies of the newspaper. It's just there to ruin something which people enjoy.

And that just about sums up that "newspaper" entirely. If you want to see why I'm annoyed, you can click here to view an image of the front page. But please, be warned, it will spoil the episode of Succession which aired around the 9th / 10th / 11th April depending where in the world you are.

Make Something Wonderful

Scott Graham

The Steve Jobs Archive has released Make Something Wonderful. A collection of Steve’s speeches, interviews, and emails. It's available to read on the web, through Apple Books, or as an epub download for e-readers. All options are free.

This piece stood out to me from a Q&A at the International Design Conference in Aspen on June 15, 1983, five months after Apple introduced the Lisa computer.

Now, Apple’s strategy is really simple. What we want to do is put an incredibly great computer in a book that you carry around with you, that you can learn how to use in twenty minutes. That’s what we want to do. And we want to do it this decade. And we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything—you’re in communication with all these larger databases and other computers. We don’t know how to do that now. It’s impossible technically.

Steve was describing smartphones and the web years before they were possible. It took until the mid-90s before the web was ubiquitous, the early 2000's until Wi-Fi really took off, and it was 2007 before he introduced the iPhone. Apple didn't manage it in that decade, but they laid out the roadmap back in 1983.

DPReview to close

Scott Graham

From DPReview:

After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview will be closing in the near future. This difficult decision is part of the annual operating plan review that our parent company shared earlier this year.

This is sad news. There was a period of my life where I was on that site at least a couple of times a day, absorbing reviews of everything from camera bodies and lenses to accessories.

Whilst it’s been a while since I was deeply in that world, I would still check in once a week to take a look at what was going on and see the gear that I would covet.

I’ll miss it.

The site will be available in read-only mode for a limited period afterwards.

I understand that there’s a considerable amount of content and it probably gets a significant amount of traffic, but there’s no reason a site which is no longer updated can’t be permanently maintained by the company which owns "the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform".

One bit of good news - Chris Niccolls and Jordan Drake are moving to PetaPixel to lead their YouTube channel.

Time to ditch the BBC and TV Licence?

Scott Graham

It's fair to say the BBC has had a bad day. In a little over 24 hours they

Withdrew Gary Lineker from Match of the Day for criticising a right wing Conservative policy. A move which the former Chairman has said was a mistake.
Announced they will not show a David Attenborough documentary which looks at the destruction of nature in the UK for fear of upsetting the right.
Trivialised the documented spousal abuse of former right wing Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson's father (the same person the former PM is alleged to have nominated for a knighthood and the same person who immediately took French citizenship after campaigning for Brexit).
Didn't scrutinise or call out claims by former right wing Conservative culture secretary Nadine Dorries about Sue Gray.

It seems that far from being impartial, as they claim, the BBC are now running scared of the right wing of UK politics and I don't like that.

Every month I pay £13.25 for my 'TV Licence'. I'm now thinking seriously about cancelling that. I have no live TV in my home. I don't listen to BBC radio. From time to time I use iPlayer - although far less than I used to - and I use the BBC website. I don't stream live TV from any other provider.

In the past year, I've only used the BBC iPlayer to watch Doctor Who and Top Gear. These days, losing Top Gear isn't a big deal and I can buy a season pass to Doctor Who on Apple iTunes for the rough cost of one month of my TV Licence.

According to the rules, I don't need a TV Licence and so I don't see any need to keep financing a corporation which is more worried about pleasing a right wing government than telling the truth.

Update: Love to see the commentators, pundits and presenters refusing to cover games in support of Lineker.

Push notifications for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS

Scott Graham

Jen Simmons and Brady Eidson on webkit.org

Now with iOS and iPadOS 16.4 beta 1, we are adding support for Web Push to Home Screen web apps. Web Push makes it possible for web developers to send push notifications to their users through the use of Push API, Notifications API, and Service Workers all working together.

It's been 16 years since the release of the iPhone, but with the release of iOS 16.4 Safari (in beta), we're getting closer to Steve Jobs' 'sweet solution'.

Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining view count

Scott Graham

From Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton at the always wonderful Platformer:

Almost two months later, though, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size. At the same time, Twitter usage in the United States has declined almost 9 percent since Musk’s takeover, according to one recent study.

I don't have data to prove it, but my guess is that whilst usage may have declined by 9%, engagement and interaction has declined by considerably more. Musk's actions have chased off the users who engaged frequently on Twitter. Far from being the Town Square, Twitter is now a broadcast network, being little more than another one-way outlet for brands and journalists to shout into the ether.

Musk, it seems, continues to fail to understand what made Twitter great. It was the people, the conversations, the dialogue. It was finding your tribe. It was finding people with different experiences, in different locations who loved the same things you do. Twitter's users and the content they produce is the product. And his actions have destroyed it.

Sir Jony Ive is back*

Scott Graham

Apple’s former chief design officer Sir Jony Ive has redesigned Comic Relief’s famous Red Nose, seeking to make it more sustainable than its predecessor.

As you'd expect from the man behind some of the most well known and respected designs of the last two decades, he's added some over-the-top design magic to the iconic red nose.

* Yes, I know about LoveFrom and the Christmas Tree, but this is his most publicly available (and affordable) product in years.

Mastodon is the darling, but weather apps remain a UI playground.

Scott Graham

Love this.

I tried this with 'gla' (for Glasgow) and it worked flawlessly. Amazing what people can do with an open API and some ingenuity.

Turns out there are a whole bunch of console services I was unaware of.

Thoughts on profit comparisons

Scott Graham

Last night Apple announced quarterly profits of $30bn. I was thinking about how I feel about that number compared to Shell's record profits and why I'm angry at one, but not the other.

I think there are a few differences.

Home energy is a public utility, not a luxury item. It literally keeps people alive and being unable to afford to put the heating on is killing people.
"Scotland produced 32,063 gigawatt hours (GWh) of renewable electricity, equivalent to around 97% of its entire electricity consumption." Even allowing for export of 50% of that to the rest of the UK, there's no reason we should be beholden to the wholesale prices of gas and electricity set by events triggered by the actions of Russia. Our bills should be subsided - at least for low income households and the elderly. Going further, I would say energy should be characterised by universal access and managed by a statutory corporation, treated the same as water in Scotland.
Apple aren't breaking into people's houses to force them to pre-pay at an even higher rate than the already inflated energy prices.
If you choose not to purchase an iPhone, MacBook or whatever there are other less expensive items roughly comparible which will allow you to get your work done. They may not have the user experience I prefer, but they have basic feature parity. There is no choice with energy. Every company is charging the same - essentially they're price fixing.

It's time to put the needs of the people above the wants of shareholders.

I'm definitely looking at this from the privileged position of someone in the West. I daresay if I was a worker in a factory used by Apple in China, I'd have a different point of view.

Shell reports highest profits in 115 years

Scott Graham

Shell had said it did not expect to pay any UK tax this year as it is allowed to offset decommissioning costs and investments in UK projects against any UK profits.

In 2015 when I moved in to my house I was paying £90 per month for electricity and gas, with the heating on for three or four hours in the morning and around five hours in the evening at 21°C from October until March.

Recently I have been paying Shell £370 per month. My electrical use is down by about 40% from 2015 and the heating on at 16°C for two hours total each day.

They tell me it's because of the wholesale cost of electricity and gas due to the events in Ukraine. Yet they're announcing £32.2bn in profits, double last year and their highest in 115 years and not paying tax on that.

Why a blog?

Scott Graham

Since 1995, I've had a web presence in some way, shape or form. They started with personal homepages from services like Geocities or the 'free' webspace included in the cost of whichever ISP I was using at the time. Like many others I eventually migrated my online presence to "Social Networks", trying most of them along the way.

Over time I've become more disgruntled at the leadership and privacy policies of social network and have either closed my accounts completely, or deleted all of my posts whilst maintaining an inactive account, just in case.

But this left me with a dilema. Where to post my thoughts and share the links I enjoy? The answer seemed obvious. I'm a web developer. I have domains. I have server capacity. Why not host and write my own link blog?

This isn't new - I'm following the format popularised by sites like kottke.org and Daring Fireball. And as time goes I'll hopefully give it my own twist. And for the first time in 28 years being online, I own my own thoughts.

I don't know how often I'll be posting here. Perhaps frequently. Perhaps infrequently. Or most likely, it will be feast and famine. I expect the audience for this to be no one other than me, but who knows.

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(If you care, I maintain accounts on Mastodon, Twitter and Instagram but rarely - if ever - post).