The Flag's a Plus

This is my standard advice for buying smartphones: Buy an iPhone if you can. If you really want an Android device, buy a Pixel. Try to avoid carrier phones. I recommend this because: Architecture matters. Apple devices are very locked down. Antivirus is unnecessary on iPhones. Patch speed matters. You don't want to be stuck waiting for your vendor or cell phone carrier. Apple makes everything, so their process is fast. With Pixel, Google makes the patches, and pushes them to phones quickly. I recently bought a new cell phone. What did I get? A Sony Experia Compact. Even I didn't follow my own recommendations. Why? Because even though I'm concerned about security, it's not my only concern. My priorities worked out like this: Must work with European cell phone frequencies. I actually own a Google Nexus phone, and I love it. Unfortunately, it's a US model, and I was finding myself with no coverage in areas where everyone around me was fine. Must be available ...

One of the things that you quickly learn when traveling in other countries is that it helps to adopt a stereotypical accent. When you say, " Schönen Tag," (Good day) you should try to say it in a stereotypical German accent. It sounds really weird to the locals if you don't. Same thing with " Bonjour" in French or " Ciao" in Italian. Just run with the stereotypes. If you're not mumbling the ends of the words, you're not speaking French properly. If you're not moving your hands, you're not speaking Italian properly. In Zürich, a lot of people speak English. In fact, I suspect that for most people, their preferred language order is Swiss German, English, then Hochdeutsch (High German -- what they speak in Germany). But, they all learn English from other Swiss people, so they speak English with a pronounced accent. I've picked up that accent. A lot. I don't do it when I'm speaking with other native English speakers or with ...

There's a concept called "Threat Modeling" that's used a lot in Information Technology (IT), but it's a useful thought exercise for day to day life, particularly when you think about computer security. Here's the simple version: try to think about all of the different people who might try to come after you online. Think about how they might attack most effectively. Then, worry about those things. Stop worrying (or worry a lot less) about attacks that won't happen to you. Why do this? Because your time and energy is limited, and a lot of the security advice that you'll see is targeted at people with a completely different threat model. A journalist has to talk to a lot of people, and makes a lot of enemies, but has to keep their sources safe. A soldier is a target because of who he is, but doesn't need to talk to strangers online. And so on. You don't have those problems, so products that are targeted at journalists or soldiers or freedom fi...

Last weekend, the weather was warm, and we had the windows open. We could hear children playing outside. Silence for a few minutes, punctuated by occasional screams, laughing, and running. It sounded like they were playing hide and seek. Then, I happened to look out the window and I saw a pair of little girls on the top corner balcony of the building across from me. One was lying prone and aiming a squirt gun that was as big as she was (a super soaker, or something similar) through a small gap in the bottom of the balcony railing. The other was acting as a spotter with her head poking over the railing and looking around the corner. They were accurately aiming and leading to hit running kids on the ground with water from about 4 stories up. I have to admit that I was impressed.

I'm going to lose some of the non-geeks on this one. I've been playing with cryptocurrency lately. Bitcoin (BTC), Dogecoin (DOGE), etc. It's interesting technology. Essentially, it's a way to buy and sell things without a centrally owned repository (like the federal reserve, or Visa/Mastercard/etc.) In a nutshell, if I want to send you a bitcoin, there's no central authority who approves the transaction (just a consensus that the transaction was valid), so there's nobody who can stop me. It's the same advantage that gold has, but it can be done over the internet. It has one enormous downside, though: it's SLOW. Because of the way that these currencies are designed, it can take more than an hour for a transaction to go through and be finalized. (You can see that it has started after about 10 minutes, but it's not truly final for about an hour.) Some of them, like Litecoin, have developed ways to speed up the process, but it still takes 10-15 minut...

Since moving, I've had to rely on Google Translate a lot. Everything from government websites to local news websites has to be translated. I'm slowly learning German, and I can occasionally make out simple articles without translation, but that little "This page is in German. Would you like to translate it?" notification gets a lot of use. Somewhere along the way, the algorithms have noticed. I'm seeing a lot more German spam, the web page ads that sneak past my adblockers are increasingly in German, and  Google Play has been playing a lot of Europop lately. Tonight, for a change of pace, Google's "I'm feeling lucky" song guesser decided that I wanted to listen to French pop. Ça joue .

I recently checked in on my retirement fund for the first time in a while. I was up 16% from this time last year. Yay! Go me! Of course, most of my retirement is in index funds that track the market as a whole. (I keep about a third in relatively low risk bonds). So, how's the market as a whole doing? Up 17% from this time last year. So, uh, I did almost as well as everyone else. Participation medals all around!