I’ve been blogging for years, primarily because I can’t shut up about things. Sometimes this is to my disadvantage. Writing is my passion, but it’s a hard thing to be financially successful at. This site is an expense. Hosting costs, domain registration, and a lot of the software I use to create what you see costs money, and I think it’s time to see if I can make it back.

That’s why I’ve added the option to subscribe to Sanspoint. For $5 a month, you can support my writing. If you are uncomfortable with a subscription, you’re also welcome to make a donation, or purchase something from my Amazon wish list. While I currently have nothing to offer you in return except good will and more writing and links, I do plan to offer some goodies to my patrons in the future. I also do not plan to truncate my RSS feed if you don’t subscribe. I’m not a fan of that approach.

You’ll find buttons and links to do all of this on the “Support” page. I hope I can count on some of my readers to make this little project of mine a going concern. Currently, I am using PayPal (and pinching my nose while I do so), but if you have any suggestions for services that can help me do this better, please email me.

To all my regular readers, whether you’ll be subscribing, donating, or not, thank you. It’s good to know people are out there, and I’m not just yelling into the void.

There’s a debate brewing around Michael Lopp’s (aka Rands) reasons for ditching his task manager. [1]

The issue that pushed me over the edge had nothing to do with functionality or stability, but stagnation. I was performing my morning scrub on Things when I realized that nothing much had changed in Things UI in, well, years.

— R.I.P. Things – Rands in Repose:

Of course, if the app works, there’s little reason to ditch it just because it hasn’t seen a major update. Law offices used WordPerfect 5.4 for DOS for years until Microsoft Word finally superseded it in the 90s.

And yet, having switched from Things to OmniFocus—twice—I can see why Rands jumped ship. Things is a very simple application, for good and for ill. If your task management needs run into the limits of what you can do with the app, you can quickly get frustrated. OmniFocus, though it has not so much of a learning curve as a learning right-angle, is much more open and flexible as to how you can use it. It can open up a lot of new ways to get things done.

Rands’s new tool of choice, Asana seems to be doing the same thing:

It’s added a little more friction and a little more religion to my task tracking process, but it’s also done something Things hasn’t done in years – it’s new bevy of functionality has me asking one of my favorite engineering questions, “How can I do this better?”

Which leads me to Daniel Jalkut’s rebuttal, and one section in particular:

[W]hat really frustrates me in this case is the software has served him perfectly, and he thanks it with a slap to the face. It’s one thing to denigrate a product for failing to meet your expectations, or for exhibiting a clear lack of craftsmanship, but Lopp admits that those problems do not apply…

Has the software been serving him perfectly? I’d say not. I remember the absolute frustration while Cultured Code took two years to figure out how to sync tasks across devices. The first iPad hadn’t even been released when they started working on the problem. I’ve said that “right trumps fast”, but OmniFocus beat them to the punch. This was why I jumped to OmniFocus the first time, once the dance of syncing my tasks with Things on my iPhone every day grew frustrating. I don’t see it as a slap in the face. I paid $70 for all three versions of the App. I think that’s compensation enough.

This is why I sympathize with Rands’s complaint that Things has “stagnated.” He’s wondering if there are ways that he could improve how he’s working, and that involves new tools. As long as it doesn’t keep you from doing the work, what harm is there in trying other tools? Especially if you feel limited by what you’re using. Enter Ben Brooks who has been inspired by the discussion to do the same thing.

My goal isn’t to try and leave OmniFocus, but to make sure OF still is the best solution for me. OF has gotten so ugly on the Mac and iPad I almost refuse to use it in those places. Which means I am essentially using the iPhone app, and even the new iPhone app isn’t the best looking app

— Moving for the Sake of Moving — The Brooks Review

I disagree about the iPhone app, though doing my reviews on the iPad often makes me frown when I see the old iOS 6-style UI. I’ve also tried the OmniFocus 2 betas and I like the direction the Mac interface is taking, though I switched back to OmniFocus 1 because I actually needed to get work done. Still, it’s Ben’s opinion, and he’s entitled to both it, and to try and find ways to optimize his workflow.

Which leads to Patrick Rhone’s series of posts on App.Net on simple systems and the concept of the no-grade. There’s no question that any digital task manager adds a lot of complexity to something that should be simple. I can only speak for myself, but having a complicated system I understand and can manipulate to a great degree really helps me a lot. I’ve tried simple systems, including pen and paper, and have gotten lost.

However, I have (re-)introduced pen and paper to augment how I get stuff done, via Bullet Journal. I see it as a way to supplement the digital system I’ve built. I’ll provide a full report on how well it’s been working once I’ve spent more than a few days with it. So far it’s been helpful, but I wouldn’t have tried it unless I’d noticed a dissatisfaction with OmniFocus and my existing system. Switching for the sake of switching can be a waste of time. Switching for the sake of trying to improve something can have huge benefits. It never hurts to at least dip in your toe.

In all the mystery around Snapchat’s insane valuations and dismissal of a $3 billion buyout by Facebook, there’s claims that Snapchat is being used by Wall Street for insider trading. Even if this isn’t the case, it’s the responsibility of Snapchat to ensure that it’s service is used in an ethical manner. This may be too much to ask from a company that made its bones by giving people a way to share temporary pictures of their naughty bits.

Hardware, software, and services all have different levels of control they have over how they can be used. Apple’s iTunes EULA has a clause requiring that it not be used to make nuclear weapons. If Kim Jong Un uses iTunes on his Mac, there’s precious little Apple can do about it. When was the last time you heard of anyone taken to court over an EULA? Once a piece of hardware or software is in the user’s hands, most bets are off.

It’s online services that have the most ability to influence what they’re used for. Many online services do enforce their terms of service, to a degree. Child porn is guaranteed to get services to act, for obvious reasons. Google and Microsoft both have created a program to block child porn from their search results. On Facebook, nudity is often a ticket to account suspension. Yet, of these same services are notoriously slow to act to shut down users who sexually harass and threaten users, behavior which is also against their terms of service.

Why? It’s easier to algorithmically identify porn than it is to identify hate speech and harassment. In Snapchat’s case, having people scan through the 350 million-plus photos on Snapchat per day for questionable or illegal content requires more manpower than is feasible. (That’s nearly a quarter million photos per minute.) Complicating matters further is that adding oversight from the start would have hampered Snapchat’s growth.

All of the the tools we create can be used for good or evil. Yet, as long as we are in the position to influence how our tools are used, it is a ethical requirement that we use that influence to make everyone’s lives better, not just line our pockets. Companies that acknowledge the potential use of their products for evil, who can act to prevent it, and do not, are committing evil by proxy. I am certain that safeguards can be put into place to, if not prevent unethical behavior on the part of users, at least mitigate its consequences. These have to be ingrained in the very fabric of the service, from the start, and it requires thought far beyond what most people put in to their apps. Perhaps we’ll see it in time.

Last week Snapchat reportedly turned down a $3 billion dollar all-cash offer from Facebook. Apparently Facebook was worried about losing the teen demographic, or perhaps they were unnerved by the 350 million photos Snapchat claims to process per day. What seems clear, though, is that Facebook is intent on “owning social.”

The only problem with this strategy is that the very idea of owning social is a fool’s errand. To be social is to be human, and to be human is, as Whitman wrote, to contain multitudes. Multitudes of apps, in my case.

— The Multitudes of Social | stratÄ“chery by Ben Thompson:

Is it better to be a specialized platform for social—or any space—than to be all things to all people? I’d agree with Ben that it’s better to specialize. We’re no longer in social media’s infancy. We’ve graduated to the toddler phase. The infrastructure basics are in place to build out any sort of social network one can dream of, no matter how niche. Actually making it sustainable in both user growth and making money is the difficult part. There are solutions to this problem, but attempting to own the entire market is not one of them.

I still have no use for Snapchat in my life, however.

There's a new product that's been making the rounds called Coin that promises to reduce the number of credit and debit cards you need to carry around to just one. It has a great video by Sandwich Video, and I was almost swayed. There were just two things standing in my way. One is the price—even the $55 (with shipping) pre-order price is a tad too rich for me right now. It is perfectly reasonable, however, for the product. The second issue is that I don't use enough cards to make it worthwhile: a debit card, and occasional credit card. Both of them fit in my minimalist wallet with room to spare.

However, after a conversation with Patrick Rhone on App.Net, I've lost all interest in the Coin project. Patrick raised a very good question:

Is it just me who looks at this and immediately thinks, “Great, just what we need. One company to get hacked for all of my card numbers and data.”?

If, as implied in the FAQ, Coin stores all their card data on a server, even encrypted, a hack attempt could pull every card a user owns and the contents of the magnetic strip, making it trivial to clone the card. ¹ Even worse, as Patrick asks, “What if Coin is served with a FISA order to provide all of your card and purchase data to a government agency?” If a hacker pulls a pile of encrypted data without the encryption code, there's still a challenge to pull real data out of the mess. If there's a government order to get the data, Coin could be under the onus to decrypt it for them. Naturally, the FAQ doesn't cover these issues.

Ben Brooks disagrees, saying that Coin doesn't seem “more risky than storing, or using, a credit card with any other company on the web.” It's true, Coin has some great security features, including automatically deactivating if it's away from your phone for too long by using Bluetooth 4.0. I'm not sure what the range of that is, but if you don't store your wallet near your phone at home, you may have to re-activate your Coin before going out. There's also some sort of safeguard to prevent adding cards you don't own, but details are scant on how that aspect works.

In the App.Net conversation around Ben's piece, user @evs notes that Coin “would remove any safety for the seller to prevent fraudulent chargebacks.”, and that “many of the newer card readers have mechanisms to reject duplicated/cloned cards, which Coin is essentially doing.” Elsewhere, @gross points out the method Coin uses to switch cards may keep it from PCI-DSS ceritifcation. All of these add up to a lot more risk than many ordinary people should be taking with their financial data.

There's some awesome technology inside of Coin. From an industrial engineering standpoint, it's a pretty impressive first generation product. It also solves a problem that is real for enough people that Coin should be able to turn their business into an ongoing concern—if they can overcome the very real risks and technical implementation issues. If Coin doesn't provide some more details on implementation: if they store card data on a server, in what form, the strength of the encryption, and if they'll fight FISA requests, the risks outweigh the benefits by a large margin.