Category: All

All posts across the whole website belong to this category. They might also belong to some other categories as well, but this one holds all of them. Hence the descriptive name – All.

You are your phone

Fig 1
Barcode of smartphone use over two weeks.Black areas indicate times where the phone was in use and Saturdays are indicated with a red dashed line. Weekday alarm clock times (and snoozing) are clearly evident.

Here are a couple of quotes from the “You are your phone” article:

Even obscure variables such as how frequently a user recharges the phone’s battery, how many incoming text messages they receive, how many miles they travel in a given day or how they enter contacts into their phone — the decision to add last name correlates with creditworthiness — can bear on a decision to extend credit.

and

The test subjects used their phones more than five hours a day, on average. Much of that usage went on unconsciously, the researchers found. When the subjects were asked to estimate how often they checked their phone during a day, the average answer was 37 times. The tracking data revealed, however, that the subjects actually used their phones 85 times a day on average, more than twice as often as they thought.

It’s an interesting read, though not too surprising.

Amazon EC2 t2.nano instances

If you thought t2.micro was a tiny machine, I have news for you – Amazon announced t2.nano instance type.  It features 512 MB of RAM, 1 vCPU, and up to two Elastic network interfaces.  Price for on-demand instance – $0.0065 per hour.

This instance type is perfect for small websites, developer and testing environments, and other tasks which don’t require a lot of resource.

GitHub redesign

github interface

About a month ago, GitHub revealed its redesigned interface.  It gets better and better with every iteration.  But this time also got a feeling of deja vu, whic took me a while to figure out.  And finally I did.  The navigation menu went from right side to the top.  And it’s not the first time it’s there.

Here is a link to the Refactoring GitHub’s Design blog post (I linked to it before), which explains some of the design decisions and the menu on the right.  Among other things, there’s a screenshot of how things used to be before.  Have a look.

old-github

It’s not identical, but it’s pretty close.