techrage

Adventures with fitness trackers

I have a theory that the advent of the Apple Watch has made serious waves in the “wearables” market. In particular, it’s forced the hand of other companies to get something–anything–out as quickly as possible.

Now, the Apple Watch looks like a fine piece of hardware, but I’ve never been the kind of person to pay $400 for a watch, and that’s not changing just because a company has lengthened the runway on another upgrade treadmill.…

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Promotion update

My goal is to be very open in my selfpub marketing approaches here, including what works and what doesn’t.

My immediate strategy is to gather my tribe in an email list. (Join here). I’m launching two short story titles, one the sequel of the other, one permafree and one paid, ideally landing both on respective top 100 lists.…

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Why I don’t Facebook

While I do participate in social media where it makes sense, I do not use Facebook. At all. In the unlikely event you run across someone there claiming to be me, it’s fake. UPDATE. See this new posting. Keeping the previous one here for historical purposes.…

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The coming bugpocalypse

It’s a common trope in SF for a society to get too reliant on technology (especially sexy alien technology) and then get into trouble when it’s taken away. In fact this seems to be a key tactic of sexy aliens. But there’s no need to invoke aliens for what is a real problem.…

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The worst security breach of 2014

Here’s a prediction. The worst security breach of 2014 isn’t something you’ve heard about. Yet. I just got word that Chick-fil-a is investigating a potential credit card breach that goes back to 2013. Yikes.

‘So, Lone Star, now you see that security crackers will always triumph because people are dumb.’…

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Top Technology Failures of 2014

Difficult to rank, as there were so many. Here’s one attempt, focused more on innovation failures. Personally, that seems a bit harsh. Holding innovation to a predictable timeline is usually a bad bet.

More serious issues for day-to-day life come from outright failures, like countless data breaches, widespread security flaws, and other things that undermine confidence in shiny things.…

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Micah Joel

Purveyor of things geeky