Author: Gordon

The coffee machine has burbled into life, the aroma wafts temptingly from the kitchen. In the bedroom my sleep monitor suggests I need to wake up in the next ten minutes and the daylight bulb in the lamp starts to glow into life. A few minutes later a gentle birdsong lulls me from my slumber, followed by the tinkling of the alarm that officially signals the start of the day. Get up, sleepyhead.

It’s a cold morning but thankfully the heating has been on for a few minutes to be at just the temperature I like so I don’t have the shock of the cold morning air to deal with.

I tell the alarm to stop, get up and walk to the bathroom, the light flickering on as I reach the door. I ask for my daily summary, and brush my teeth whilst listening to the voice that emits from the nearest speaker to confirm that the delivery I’m expecting today left the depot 40 mins ago and is scheduled to be with me between 2 and 3pm. It also tells me that there will be some light showers this morning, before reading me the news headlines and letting me know it’s sorry that the Lakers lost, again.

Back to the bedroom and I get dressed and tell the curtains to open. I drop my dirty clothes in the washing basket (it remains quiet as the basket is only half full), and head to the kitchen to grab a cup of freshly brewed coffee. I pour in some milk, tossing the empty carton in the bin and as I close the fridge door the panel on the front lights up to confirm that ‘Milk’ has been added to my shopping list.

I ask for the radio to play 6Music whilst I make myself some breakfast.

Welcome to the future.

OK, welcome to MY future, YMMV.

I grew up in a world of Star Wars, Buck Rogers, Space: 1999, Star Trek and more. One of the first novels I read was 2001 (and all three sequels). I love Sci-Fi and the closer we get to some of the ideas that have been floating around in my pop culture subconscious since I was a child the more excited I get at the possibilities all this new technology may bring.

The scary realisation is that this new connected and automated world isn’t all that far away. Most, if not all, of these products already exist and I won’t lie, the geek in me is excited to live in such times. By most accounts the next 10 years will see voice activated automation (aka digital assistants) become the ‘norm’. Sound ridiculous? Well, it was only 10 years ago that the iPhone was launched and popularised the idea of a smart phone which brought touch screen to the masses. Can you remember getting your first smart-phone and how ‘magic’ a good touch-screen device was? I don’t think it’s so fanciful to imagine this all happening in my own lifetime (and I’m already middle aged!).

Of course some of these connected devices sound ridiculous. I do not need an ‘intelligent clothes basket’ to tell me that I need to put a wash on, and I don’t really need motorised, controllable curtains.

On the other hand I live alone so whilst they may seem a little extraneous for my needs, a family of four might see the intelligent clothes basket as a wonderful addition, and for those not physically able to close curtains having a device you can command to do such things would be a welcome help.

However many of these products have been around for a while. You can buy sleep monitoring apps/devices that wake you when they think it’s best, rather than at a pre-set time. Sunrise lamps have been around for years (I use something similar to this myself), coffee machines have had timers in them for decades, and motion activated lights definitely aren’t new. Admittedly things like smart fridges and tiny computers that listen to your every word and await your command (ohhh powerful one) are still rare beasts, although Amazon Alexa is already challenging that notion, but the software they are using is several years old and improving rapidly as it matures.

And all of that is before we even crack open the lid on recent advances being made in A.I. which, for the sake of brevity I’ll leave for another time (but as a starter, feel free to dive into the rabbit-hole with this article on Google Translate).

Ever since we started stepping towards the Internet of Things, such products and services have intrigued me, making me wonder how close we are to the future I envisioned as a child. I still kindle the hope that all of these wondrous new technologies will work together in perfect harmony. The robot butler of my dreams is much closer than it has ever been.

Yet, unfortunately, I think my dreams will need to remain as they are for a time yet, I think that reality is still a ways off and the central point of contention that will thwart adoption of such wondrous technological advances will be something more mundane.

Standards (and the lack thereof).

Amazon, Google, Apple, and every other company in this space, all want you to exclusively use their stuff, they are companies, that’s what companies should do. As a result I’ve not seen many steps towards a global (yes my US friends, there are other tech users in the world) standard for home automation. To be frank from the outside looking in, which is where the vast majority of people are, it all looks like a bit of a mess. Even the most mature product, Amazon’s Alexa, requires a myriad of connected services and some IFTTT loops to get some things to work, and if you happen to have the wrong 3rd party device or service then, sorry, you won’t even be able to connect them at all.

And there’s the rub, I can’t trust that any connected device I purchase in the future will work well with the ones I already own.

For example, I currently have a few LIFX light bulbs at home. I bought the first one via Kickstarter (cos, geek) and I use IFTTT to control a couple of them based on arbitrary things like my location or when the sun is setting to turn them on. All of my computing tech is Apple based but can I control them using SIRI? No, because they aren’t part of the ‘HomeKit’ world (yet? who knows). I could control them using Alexa or Google Home but that requires purchasing more tech to control my existing tech, and doing more connecting of services and applications.

I already use multiple services from different companies, so I’m used to this world. I have an Amazon Prime account which I can only watch through my PlayStation as it’s not supported on my AppleTV. I use Google for my personal email and calendar, and Spotify is my music streaming of choice, all of which mean I can’t ask Siri for help because she only cares about Apple Music, and I find myself replicating my Google calendar data in Apple’s calendar just to have the data available to other services within the Apple sphere. It’s madness!

Only Netflix seems to play nice with everyone else, it’s everywhere. But then, it’s a standalone company with everything to gain by being available everywhere. Amazon, Apple, and Google all want me to use THEIR content on THEIR devices. Which means I lose out as a consumer. Yeah, this connected world isn’t sounding so great after all.

I want a smart home, I want smart automation, I want a robot butler. But I also want fewer smart things, not more. Fewer devices, fewer services. I do not want to have two or more content streaming devices just so i can watch the content that I want to watch. It all feels very disconnected and right now it’s the customers that are feeling the brunt. Sure you can have all this cool new stuff but damn, it’s gonna suck the life outta ya trying to get it work.

And so it seems that the future of anything akin to a singular, properly intelligent, home (life?) automation assistant is left to chance, or at the very least, hope. I hope that IFTTT will continue to grow and add new services, I hope that Amazon, Google, and Apple will support more and more 3rd party applications and I hope that new hardware will not be slow to be accessible in all ecosystems. I hope that buying a new device in the future won’t require me to authenticate it, and a new service that supports it, across multiple different services and platforms (security issues not withstanding).

I want fewer things, not more. I want less hassle, not more. I am the epitome of wanting tech to ‘just work’.

I guess the challenge is that one of the big players needs to be first to open their doors to this, the first to put the customer at the heart of all of this and say ‘hey, you know what, connect to us, run our app on any device you want, we don’t want you to have to jump through hoops any more’ and I just don’t see that happening.

Welcome to the future! Come on in and enjoy all this cool stuff that happens because it knows when and where it should happen. Yeah my front door unlocked itself as I walked up the driveway, how cool is that? Sure my mattress knows I didn’t sleep well and will send a message to my boss saying I’ll be in a little late this morning, doesn’t yours? Of course I can issue one command and have the lights dim, the surround sound system turn on and the movie channel opened on my TV (and yeah, of course the popcorn maker fires up at the same time!). This is the future, it’s totally awesome!

Just do me one favour, ignore the mess.

Note that I’m only considering home assistant/automation, it’s whole other world when it comes to cars ; do YOU want to be choosing your next car based on the digital assistant it has and if it will ‘play nice’ with everything else you already have?

Then consider everything outside of your home and car. What if my nearest supermarket chooses to partner with Google, but I’ve gone down the Amazon route? That advert that is offering a discount on my lunch to all Cortana users is lost to me and poor old Siri.

I’m sure smart people will figure a lot of this stuff out but is does feel like we are at a tipping point. It’s going from ‘why would I want’ to ‘how did I live without’ and I’m old enough to remember this happening with microwaves and home computers. And sure, that’s all well and good, that’s what progress is I guess, but for us poor schmucks who just want things to work, well I think it’s about to get even more messy indeed.

Further reading:
– http://readwrite.com/2017/01/19/badly-need-iot-standardization-dl4
– http://readwrite.com/2016/12/16/lack-of-interoperability-is-killing-iot-a-call-to-action-for-iot-stakeholders-dl4/

Dear Lucy,

I can’t quite believe it’s been a year since your Mummy phoned me and asked if I could hear anything in the background, and there was the sound of you crying as gently as the new-born you were.

I’ll happily admit to tearing up at the news (get used to that by the way, I’m a big pile of mush where you are concerned) and all my visits in the first few months were full of awe and wonder, cradling this tiny little person in my arms, this beautiful little girl who grabbed my heart the minute I saw her. The first photo I have of you and me in the hospital (yes, I got a t-shirt made up, don’t worry, you’ll get used to that too) is already one of my most treasured.

You slept a lot at first, which is what babies are supposed to do, and then you opened those beautiful big eyes of yours and spent the next several months taking in all these new sights. You have a quiet curiosity that I think will stand you in good stead as you grow older and I hope you can stay that way for a long time; the world can be full of wonder if you look at it the right way.

Now, I have to mention the period you went through of bursting into tears every time I walked in the room. I mean sure, it only happened a few times, but seeing my darling little niece crying BECAUSE OF ME was just awful (remember, I am mush!). No, no, I’m not blaming you, I know it was a phase and not a conscious decision or anything, but I can’t help but want you to always be happy, to feel safe and loved (mush, I say!), and crying doesn’t really fit in to the equation!

I’m glad it didn’t last long, but I still wonder what was going through your mind at the time, all those little synapses firing, connecting things, making sense of the world. Hey, you’ve got a LOT going on, I get it.

Watching you grow over this past year has been amazing. The way you are learning where things are, what things are called, and interacting with the world around you both boggles my brain and delights me at every turn. I literally can’t keep my eyes off you, and I’m already wary of how cute you are and how much of a soft touch I know I’ll be when you grow older!

This is the second letter I’ve written to you and I feel a bit bad because when you are older you’ll maybe look back at the events of 2016 and they will seem to be dominated by negativity; I won’t lie, it’s been a colossally shit year. But it’s important that you remember that you were a ray of light at the darkest of times, and it was through your eyes that we saw the world a different way, through your eyes that we let all that other noise fall away whilst we watch you marvel and discover and grow.

Of course it’s been a pretty big year for you, aside from that whole being born thing, obviously. You started crawling and have now mastered what can only be described as a sprint crawl as you whizz around. Not only that but you are teetering towards your first steps and will soon be toddling about the place, as inquisitive as ever.

As if that wasn’t enough you went and started speaking! A few words so far but that will soon build to short sentences and, in no time at all, you’ll be saying important things like “Uncle G is awesome!” but let’s not be too hasty, there’s plenty of time for that (I’ll always be awesome, don’t worry).

Side note: I am a little disappointed your first word wasn’t ‘aardvark’ but I won’t hold it against you.

So, what does this year hold in store for you? Well pretty much more of the same, everything will continue to be new and you’ve got a lot more discovering to do, and I’m so excited to watch you grow. I hope we can continue the ‘no crying when I enter the room’ pact we seem to have struck, but don’t worry if it still happens sometimes. A recurring theme as you get older will be that I won’t ever have expectations of you or how you choose to live your life, just be whoever you want to be and that’ll make me happier than you’ll probably ever realise.

I know I’m not around every week, but you are always in my thoughts. You don’t realise it yet but you are growing up in a world of social media and so I see pictures and videos of you almost every day. I see how loved you are by Mummy and Daddy, how both sets of grandparents dote on you, and your beatific smile cuts through everything, no matter how bad my day might have been; having you around makes everything that little bit better and brighter.

You are adorable, beautiful, delightful, and more.

Happy Birthday Lucypops!*

Uncle G

* I’m trying to find a decent nickname for you so bear with me, I’m sure we’ll find something.

A photo posted by Gordon McLean (@gmclean) on Jan 8, 2017 at 2:53pm PST

There is no doubt that since getting my Apple Watch the three little coloured circles that appear on my watch face have helped me realise just how little I used to move. Since then, and admittedly with a change of job and a more ‘walking’ based commute, I’ve been noticeably more mobile, but what has struck me is how effective this simple little case of gamification has been.

The Activity circles on the Apple Watch cover three categories, Move, Exercise, and Stand.

The Move category (the red circle) is a weekly target based on estimated calories burned every day. It’s the only one that is easily adjusted and each week you’ll get a new suggested target (so the more you Move, the higher the target the following week).

The Exercise category (the green circle) uses your heart rate, and anything above ‘resting’ is classed as Exercise. You can also track specific activities like walking, cycling and running, which all add to the green circle.

And the Stand category (the light blue circle) tracks how active you are within a given hour. If you’ve been stationary for 50 mins, you get a prompt to stand and move around. To close this circle you need to ‘stand’ 12 times a day.

At the end of an average day I’ve usually closed the green Exercise circle, am close to closing the red Activity circle, and depending on my day have 2 or 3 ‘stands’ left to close the light blue Stand circle. Some days by the time I get home, all three are closed.

It’s a simple enough way to break things down and it’s definitely made me more aware and found me pondering getting off the bus early to help ‘close a circle’, and once you are in that mindset you quickly start to consider ‘streaks’, how long can I manage completing every circle every day? (the image at the top of this post was an award badge for closing every circle for 7 days in January, an extra New Year boost).

I’m quite comfortable getting gamed like this, it fits my goal driven approach and as I’m letting my watch take care of the ‘basics’ it’s one less things to think about so I’m turning my attention to other things I can do to try and incorporate more exercise into my day.

I am not for a minute suggesting that you buy an Apple Watch solely to make use of this single feature – and it’s worth noting that there is a specific exercise app for tracking runs/walks which I’ve used a few times – but alongside the ability to triage incoming emails, tweets and messages, and get discrete notifications from a variety of apps, it has fast become my main reason for wearing the watch every day.

And this is especially true of my lazier days. Just this past weekend I almost didn’t wear it on Sunday as I was pretty hungover and tired and didn’t really want to interact with the world but I put it on, went about my day, and by 8pm realised I was on track to complete the circles, all I need to do was 20 minutes of exercise.

20 minutes later the circles were complete, as was my first perfect week of the year. Next target, a perfect January!

I love mornings like this, the late winter chill fading away as the sun climbs lazily into the sky. I can feel the gentle dew on my extremities starting to warm, and the ground beneath me stirring into life.

There is a gentle breeze playing over my naked branches and I find myself yearning for spring, for the new growth it will bring, leaves that will play in the wind, I long for their rhythmic rustle. I miss my little snowdrop friends already but soon the daffodils will start to appear, tiny glowing suns that never fail to brighten my day.

Over on the other side of the field I can see the humans arriving on their machines, so noisy and smelly. The things they are building are as tall as me but there is something cold about them, unnatural. The humans come in the morning and leave as night returns, and more and more of the strange things rise up from the ground.

I never understand what they do.

I’ve been watching them for a while now, they are getting closer and closer. Recently they started making black patterns in the ground. One of the patterns is reaching out to me it seems, but I don’t know why.

Some of the humans are coming to look at me. They are such odd things, like birds or bees they move around a lot which I think is sad. Why can’t they be happy in one place, each day unfurling anew around them? I don’t understand it.

They are beneath me now. What is that they have around my trunk? It tickles my bark.

I never understand what they do.

Little noises from them, first one then another, back and forth, like birds singing to each other. One of them has picked up a shiny branch, ohh a horrible noisy smell and the shiny branch is moving and whirring. The human that grew it is moving it towards me, more tickling. The shiny branch is making all my tiniest branches jiggle and shake. What silly thing are they doing?

The shiny branch is disappearing into me, maybe they think I need a shiny branch? But what would I do with it, my branches are all I need, once the leaves have unfurled from deep inside me I will be complete again and all my power will return. I don’t need a shiny branch as well, don’t they understand?

I long for my leaves so I can breathe again, but I hope the humans aren’t still ruining the air. My air used to be full of life and stories, now it feels empty and sad.

The human is taking the shiny branch away! It must realise I don’t need it after all.

Ohhh wait, it’s trying to give me it in a different place, buzzing away at me. I’ll need to grow some new bark. The buzzing of the shiny branch makes me think of a giant wasp, trying to get inside me. I remember a long time ago when I made friends with a whole family of wasps, they created a wonderous new branch that hung from one of mine. They were my friends for a whole summer but one day, as winter approached, they all left and their branch broke and went to the ground. I can still sense parts of it down there.

That’s odd, the buzzing has stopped and now they are pulling out a bit of me. Why are they doing that? That belongs to me. I don’t mind them taking bits of bark, I have plenty of that but I need those bits. How rude of them. Silly humans and their noisy shiny spinning branches.

More branches now, with shiny ends. They are disappearing into my trunk. In and out as the humans swing them back and forth.

I never understand what they do.

More tickling, they are putting another long thin bendy branch round me. It is connected to one of their noisy machines. It’s spouting horrible fumes into the air, I’m so glad my leaves are hidden still.

The bendy branch is tugging at me, this is so very odd.

Now the sky is moving or is it the ground. I’m so confused.

Where have the humans gone, they were below me but now they are over there beside me looking at me. They are smiling. The sky is in the wrong place now. So is the ground. And I can’t feel the earth beneath me anymore.

I never understand what they do.