Data

Not sure who needs to know this, but here’s some fun trivia for you: You can send text messages from 4G/LTE enabled routers.. This functionally means that if you were particularly disciplined with how you dealt with texting, you could place one of those routers literally anywhere in the world, use a compatible SIM card that’s attached to your identity, and you have yourself a little covert operative that misleads your ISP into thinking you are somewhere you are not. Make sure that all of the texts you make to banks, businesses, etc are run from that router and SIM. ...

If You’re Not Paying, You’re The Product. I hate the above phrase. My problem with it isn’t in its intent, because I agree with the sentiment. We as consumers need to look at the products we use an determine whether there might be some hidden costs to the convenience that companies provide us. So what’s my issue? EVEN IF YOU PAY FOR A SERVICE, YOU ARE STILL A PRODUCT. I’ve been thinking of a video that I saw about a year ago. It’s from consumer-friendly lobbyist and personal hero of mine, Louis Rossmann. ...

What’s the Deal with Data? If you read my post on the best tech video ever, you will know that I will always prefer plaintext files over pretty much every other format. In that article I explain how the simplicity of plaintext and the flexibility of unix tools make text not only easier to work with, but remarkably powerful, and un-killable if you know how to use git. The problem with text is that there is a kind of limit to what it can be used for without adding more abstraction to it. Let’s say you want structured data, similar to the kind you might find in a spreadsheet. You’ll run into an issue with plaintext because it doesn’t force a structure itself. It’s freedom becomes a vice in that context. You’ll have the freedom to mess up the data. ...