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Report: Humanity not ready for aliens to be ready for humanity to be ready to find out that aliens have told the USA and Israel that humanity’s not ready for aliens.
In honour of my birthday today, please make a donation in my name to the Human Fund, money for people.
Photo by human, Jason Corroto.
Three weeks into taking a shot on Qoin, an Australian crypto currency launched by Batercard that you can actually use in retail and for services, and although I have not spent money yet, I’ve sold a few second hand things and from that injection of AUD I’m 12% up on Aussie dollar valuation over three weeks.
I wish I knew more about crypto currencies, but then whenever I look I feel like I know everything there is to know, so maybe it’s just all Wild West?
The reports of my 39th birthday are greatly exaggerated. I’m actually only 12.
A story about an Aussie athelete who posted himself in a crate from the UK to Australia, disappeared from Adelaide after he was charged with conspiracy to import cocaine, sentenced to death for drugs offences in Sri Lanka, but only spent five years in jail in Australia.
I’d neglected to mention weight/size in my reMarkable 2 review - so it’s been updated. The reMarkable is 18% smaller than the iPad Pro and weighs 15% less. When you’re talking about gadgets held in hands, that’s a difference.
I’m starting to focus on self portraits
Can the reMarkable 2 replace my iPad Pro?
When the first generation iPad Pro was released I saw two opportunities for my personal workflow. One was the easy, and simply beautiful, method for my couples to sign their Australian marriage paperwork electronically. The other was for me to leave my Mac at home with my heavy travel schedule and make the iPad the computer I took away from the house.
The iPad served both of those roles quite adequately, even more so as I upgraded to the 11" iPad Pro and the second generation Apple Pencil.
The niggling feeling I’ve had for the past year though, has been that I was too closely involved with the iPad, so much so that I couldn’t see it’s flaws, and the unhealthy relationship we’d developed.
Things like: finding peace with transferring a 4K video off an SD card into the iPad and there being no status update as to how much of the file has transferred or how much longer it will take; struggling with the multi-tasking two-three apps open at once strategy called Split View and how it never really worked that well; how so many developers seemingly don’t actually use an iPad despite developing apps for it, displayed usually by the lack of iPad feature support, or forcing us to use it in portrait mode when there’s a keyboard attached and it’s in landscape mode; and finally, so many developers just refusing to develop for the iPad, Instagram most notably.
So two products were launched this year that had a real shot at replacing the iPad and my entire computing setup.
The first was the MacBook running on Apple Silicon. It runs iOS-only apps better than an iPad, and it brings the responsiveness and the speed of the iPad, to the Mac, rendering my 16" MacBook Pro with an Intel chip, obsolete. The only thing the MacBook Air with Apple Silicon did not do was give me touch and stylus.
Enter, reMarkable 2.
So I gave in and ordered a reMarkable.
First looks
The reMarkable 2, or the Remarkable as I’ll refer to it from here on out, is a beautiful product, packaged beautifully.
Set up
The Remarkable syncs with the propriety cloud service, reMarkable Cloud.
And is supported by desktop and mobile apps.
Files can be uploaded to the cloud, and when the device connects to wifi, it synchronises back and forth.
Using reMarkable
The device is beautiful to use. It’s a simple, single-use, device. It displays documents and allows you to mark them up. Imagine a regular paper notebook married to that stack of documents on your desk.
The handwriting detection is pretty amazing well, considering my handwriting is more like a scrawl.
The unit also dabbles as a PDF reader and eBook reader, a task it handles well despite not being a Kindle. I’d love to have access to my Kindle library!
Compared to the iPad Pro 11"?
The Remarkable is 100% a nicer device to hold in your hand, and to write on. I’m using the stylus that has an eraser in the head of the stylus, and the screen is what Paperlike has been trying to bring to the Apple tablet family.
I find the Remarkable easier to write on, annotate with, and hold in my hand - with or without the leather case - the only problem is that it’s not running iPadOS and it doesn’t have an LTE modem.
If you’re trying to imagine what it feels like, imagine a large and thin Kindle you can draw on.
Size and weight
The Remarkable 2 is 187mm wide, 246mm high x 4.7 mm thick, compared to an A4 piece of paper, 210mm wide, 297mm high, and you know how thick it is. Compared to the iPad Pro 11", which is 179mm wide, 248mm high, and 5.9 mm thick.
The iPad Pro 11" is actually the thinnest Apple computer ever made, but it feels like a brick after holding the Remarkable in your hand.
The Remarkable weighs 404 grams, and the iPad is 473 grams, 69 grams heavier, a 17% increase in weight as you weigh them up in your hands.
It’s certianly nicer to hold the Remarkable, and especially when you factor in covers, cases, or keyboards. The Smart Keyboard really bulks out the iPad, whilst the Remarkable’s leather folio is still quite slim and lovely to hold.
Problems
The reMarkable 2 will only connect to “regular” wifi networks, not public wifi networks requiring authentication through a website, like the Qantas Free Wifi.
And the Mac software is the slightest bit buggy, but the developers have promised fix.
Will it do the job?
The reMarkable 2 is replacing my iPad Pro. It might not have a 4G modem, Dropbox sync, or the Kindle app, but it is the best electronic ink tablet with a stylus money can buy right now.
If the reMarkable guys are reading this, I’ll throw in a last minute request for a Safari extension as well, not all of us use Chrome :).
Luna, teaching bubba to swim
Bullish on Airbnb in a post-Covid world
Airbnb’s strength today and in a post-covid travel world is in it’s flexibility to offering a different kind of travel.
“Airbnb’s “gross daily rate” was pretty flat at the end of last year, hovering around $110. This, too, declined in April. But by June, it had increased to $146, and has since settled to a rate around 20% higher than last year — $128 in September.”
Airbnb in 2020 would be one of the least affected-by-Covid companies on the planet.
“One of my favorite taglines in recent memory was Airbnb’s “Live There,” a campaign it launched in 2017 with the agency TBWA. It’s as cheesy as any earnest brand campaign. But it feels true. A real representation of the Airbnb spirit, something its frequent customers can appreciate. Airbnb-ing isn’t remotely the same as staying in a lame chain hotel in a tourist quarter.”
And he shares an interesting story about why Airbnb probably isn’t the best and biggest travel content creator today:
“In late 2012, Airbnb launched a product called “Neighborhoods”,” he wrote, “which offered users incredibly rich and unique content about individual neighborhoods around the world. Visitors loved it. Almost too much. It turned out the content was so interesting that it distracted visitors from actually booking. When the team removed it from the home page, bookings went up.”
From Dan Frommer’s New Consumer newsletter
This is Maddie and Casey’s elopement, with me creating the marriage ceremony, photographed by Bec Zacher Photography for The Elopement Collective on the Sunshine Coast.
What do I actually do?
I lead my whole life in preparation to be your celebrant. Living the joy in my own marriage, leading my family, enjoying my friendships, travelling, living, drinking, sleeping, and eating, preparing for this succinct and breathtaking moment in your wedding. We’ll have meetings, breakfasts, lunches, dinners, coffees and beers. We email, talk, text, and DM, over months and years.
You walk down this aisle, everyone cheers, and then the crowd hushes.
You’re standing here, holding hands, and everyone waits for me to start talking.
What do I say? How do I say it? What vibe do I leave? How long do I speak for? Will it be too long or too short? Do I say and pronounce your name correctly? Will my PA speaker system actually work? How will everyone feel? Will I do anything awkward or weird? Do you trust me? What kind of marriage are we talking about?
It all comes down to that moment where I bring the microphone to my mouth and starting dropping syllables.
Someone watching me create a ceremony recently said that I just “ad-libbed” the ceremony because I didn’t read from a script. It’s so much more than that. I have to stand there confident about what I’m going to say after asking myself all those questions I just mentioned, and do it with a calm and happy demeanour, without burying my face and voice in a script.
I arrive an hour or more early, and I wait while you’re late, then stay around after to help with group photos or to help your Nanna to the reception.
I live an entire life preparing for these 18-minute-long moments we call a marriage ceremony. And it’s amazing, I’m so grateful I get to be that guy. Thank you for inviting me in.
Looks like a glasshouse …
Aircraft doing hard time
Do you think the COVID-19 vaccine should be mandatory?
“I don’t think in the case of COVID we’re in a position to be mandating because, one, we don’t have enough of them yet and you can’t mandate something that you’re not ready to deliver equitably. And I also think mandating something right now, where I think publics are really at their wits’ end with the amount of externally imposed controls—even when you know it’s meant to be a good thing, there’s a limit. And I think right now, one more thing that’s mandated by government will not be well tolerated.”
Feels good to be back, standing outside the Gold Coast Qantas Club with a bunch of other members moments before it opens, as each new person who would imagine the lounge to be open by now, stridently - almost aggressively - walks past the congregation, gets to the automatic sliding door and their face sinks as it doesn’t open.
It’s been nine months, I miss you Qantas frequent flyers, you bring me joy.
Sunset from Mooloolaba to the Glasshouse Mountains
Ok, it’s competition time, let’s do this.
Best palindromes, go!
The first rule of drone club is don’t take your drone swimming.
