Category: Technology

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Life Technology

Technology Can Enhance

There are many times I scoff at the idea of technology being able to always change our lives for the better. That is not to say that it CANNOT change our lives for the better, but the idea that adding technology will ALWAYS change our lives for the better I think is not just wrong, but toxic.

However, there is one area where it does help me and that is in keeping track of what I am eating.

I am not going to pretend that the Lose It! app is going to magically make me more healthy, but what it does provide me is an avenue to look at what I am eating and to make some decisions. For me, it is portion size.

Being able to scan the bar codes of what I am eating/drinking and to know the nutritional contents of that item without needing to sit down and tabulate and read makes it something I am more likely to do. Keeping track over time allows me to keep track of how my habits might be changing. Adding the ability to track my weight at the same time gives me a measurable outcome with which I can see a difference being made.

Those are all good things.

However, it is also not enough. I still need to take that information and make choices about what I am and am not going to do. Technology can help us with things, but it cannot replace us as humans nor our need to make choices for ourselves.

So often technology tries to take the human out of the picture, but we love something important: the human.

Technology can help, it can be a tool, and it can enhance but it cannot, and should not replace.

Categories
Technology

Learning iOS Programming … Again

Time to dig into the past again … something I have been hoping to do but never jumped in and actually accomplish.

I’ll let you, the reader, search through the archives to find my failed attempts at learning iOS development/programming along with any number of other technologies. It is really a running joke in my own mind by now that I can’t follow-through with anything in this realm. I haven’t launched any products (web or otherwise) and haven’t put anything up on the App Store either.

Learning iOS Dev

I’m back at it again, however, and I hope I can get something onto the App Store this time (no matter how small it might be). This time I have Learning iOS Development from Addison Wesley to work through along with my prior work in iOS 5/6 to get me through this and to the next level.

Apple has pushed the platform ahead quite a bit with iOS 7 and there is a lot to learn. I’ve been lucky enough to watch the iOS 7 Tech Talks along with some of the WWDC 2013 sessions as well. It has worked not so much to give me an overview of the changes (which it has), but to get me pumped up and excited about development and the platform as a whole.

I’m shifting my focus a little bit to some small agricultural apps to start (I hope). There are many “paper only” tasks on the farm right now and I want to be able to capture those in some useful ways along with eliminating the need to write so often for things which really are just numbers.

I’ll hopefully have some more information that in the future as I continue to try to work out the specifics, but it will piggyback on the new farm entity we created (more on Martens Family Farm in the future, obviously) and the primary use will be small-to-medium farms and helping them get the most out of their work.

I hope.

Categories
Life Technology

Future Farming

I have been reminded that I should probably write some updates on how the farm projects are currently coming. We have a few “irons in the fire” so to speak, so I’ll just run through a few of them here.

Martens Family Farm

For the first time we have taken the steps to create a business entity around some of the farming operation. Mainly we’ve taken our existing hog operation and turned it into a partnership and then had that partnership expand from there. It has allowed us to bring in more people officially and also start looking to the future and more expansion from our start.

By setting up the entity we are also able to free up one member of the family, my brother, to hopefully being working on the farm as his primary means of income. The hope is that this dedicated time will allow us to not just improve the existing operation, but free up some flex time for expanding into new areas as well.

Expanding the Hog Operation

The main area of expansion for 2014 is the doubling of our hog operation. This was the impetus for the creation of Martens Family Farm, the entity, and also will allow my brother the freedom to spend more time on the farm operation. It also means I will have a lot more to do with compliance paperwork and finances.

Right now the barn is nearing completion with much of the interior work to be done, but once the barn is complete we look forward to spending a single day bringing in all 4000 head of hogs into the entire operation and getting things up and running as quickly as possible. It is quite exciting.

Paperless Farming

This is my main goal. I want to try to eliminate as much of the physical paper being moved around the farm as possible. My parents own iPhones, and iPad, and an iMac so getting the files stored and moved around should not be a huge issue, I just need to start experimenting so that we can get things working.

We are using QuickBooks Online to handle the money portion or the business and their iOS apps make it quite easy to add receipts into the system. I have not really needed to touch the desktop web interface all that much since we started. It has been pretty good.

The next thing on my list is to purchase a small, portable scanner so that I can take it to the hog office, scan in the paperwork, and then go home and handle the task of organizing things from the comfort of my own home. I have narrowed it down to a few scanners and will report back what I will be using.

Some other ideas focus around the creation and completion of some simple iOS applications which would allow us to track the progress of the hog operation without needing to send faxes back to our partners every single day. That is a long-term goal, but I think I’ll have more to say on that in the future.

Future Ideas

I’ve already stated one of them, the creation of some iOS apps to help with record-keeping and progress-tracking, so I won’t rehash that here.

I am actively looking at FarmLogs to help us track our crop operation as well, which is separate from the hogs but would allow us another testing ground for things. It would allow us to track more information about what we are doing and have done with our individual fields so that we would have some sort of electronic record of what is going on. I am just starting to see if it is something we could use in the coming year. When all of your partners in the operation own iOS devices, it opens up new possibilities.

We have a very small group of egg-laying hens right now and we plan on maybe starting to expand that as well. So far we have enough eggs for our family to use, but adding more hens would mean we would get to open it up to some of our friends in the area. I guess my grandmother used to keep 300 hens on the farm … but we are not looking at anything like that.

One larger project we are just beginning to talk about would be adding a small herd of beef cattle onto the place as well. We need to look at what permitting we would need to look into and also prep an area for the herd to graze, but we’ve always like the idea of keeping a small number of beef cattle around for our own benefit along with allowing us to sell custom beef to local people and restaurants. A lot more planning needs to go into this, but it is something we are actively thinking about.

Conclusion

There are many changes going on right now and many more to come. 2014 should be another banner year as we continue to push ahead with what we’ve done and diversify into new areas as well.

The agriculture sector is a mish-mash of expensive technology available only to the largest growers and nothing, which is how many smaller growers are still doing things. I think it is a fertile area for some small companies to make a big difference.

Categories
Technology

Downside to Automatic Updates

On the Debug 24.1 with Daniel Jalkut, Ryan Nielsen, and John Siracusa as guests, they talked quite a bit about what is going to happen with software updates in the future. I recommend both Debug 24 and 24.1 for a really great discussion around many things Apple and software development in general.

However, their almost wholesale support of automatic updates for everything scares me quite a bit. It isn’t surprising really because as a person who is excited about progress in technology myself I usually ride the edge as much as possible, but I think there are some things not considered by people who either are used to running the latest version of everything or have a vested interest in having people on the latest version of everything.

  • Automatic updates will allow developers and companies to push controversial features without people having the opportunity to keep an older version until everything cools off. Tweetie-turned-Twitter for iOS is a great example of this. If people were not able to keep their older version of Twitter for iOS, then you would have had to wait until it blew over or just grin and bear it because it is updated and you have no choice.
  • The idea of “tough luck” being the default answer for people who are automatically pushed to new versions seems like a user-hostile-but-developer-friendly way of handling things.
  • Being able to support anything goes out the window. If everything automatically updates then you no longer are able to keep anything stable. We already deal with this often with web applications and it is a pain (probably the greatest point of pain).

This is the part where people often scream “but this is the future, just deal with it” … and I smile, nod, and then think quietly to myself why.

As humans we seem to have a serious issue with thinking that something newer automatically is better. For whatever reason we think progress is always a good thing instead of always being a compromise each and every time and maybe, just maybe, it isn’t always a good thing.

We don’t always make things better. We don’t always get it right the second time around. It is entirely possible that the choices you are making today are worse in some very important ways and we need to live with that.

The every-present  feeling that we need to keep pushing forward faster and faster and into more areas is entirely human. However, we need to always be aware that while we might think we’re doing something awesome … we might just be wrong.

Categories
Technology

It’s A Tractor

We hear a lot about how computing is changing and Steve Jobs himself used the car vs. truck analogy when speaking about the new mobile-centric devices vs. general-purpose computing devices at the D8 conference in 2010. John Paczkowski has a follow-up, now three years later, to that statement by Jobs.

I think that analogy is a little weak, however. Too many people drive trucks even when they don’t need to.

Being a farm kid, I’ve come to think of the differences more in-line with car vs. tractor. You will not find many people driving or even owning tractors unless they have an explicit purpose for them. Here is how it works in my mind:

  • You CAN do everything you can with a car with a tractor. You can drive places. Haul things. Move from place to place … but you are handicapping yourself in some way and adding a lot of complexity to get things done. This is the weakest part of my change in analogy.
  • There are things you CANNOT do with a car that you need to be able to accomplish with a tractor. I would love to see someone pull  ripper through a freshly harvested field with their car (any car). A tractor is set up to be able to do this thing explicitly.
  • Different types of tractors are purpose-built for certain jobs. The largest of the articulated four-wheel-drive tractors is meant almost exclusively for tillage. I’d think those are more in-line with the Mac Pro of today. The more general-purpose tractors are along the lines of the iMac or MacBooks available now (using Apple-centric ideas).

The thought is that the line is being ever-more-thickly drawn between what we thought of computers even two or three years ago and the newer, mobile-centric devices we are seeing permeate the populace. This was brought into focus into my mind when reading the AnandTech review of the 2013 Mac Pro. Here is the closing line to the review (and you should read the whole thing):

If you have a workload that justifies it and prefer OS X, the Mac Pro is thankfully no longer just your only solution, it’s a great solution.

Woven throughout the entire piece is the idea that the Mac Pro has been created and tuned for very specific needs, a very specific purpose, and with very specific workloads in mind (highly parallel, makes use of GPU acceleration, etc.). I have the feeling we are going to be seeing more and more “compromises” made to target specific types of workloads because that is the way to get big gains in some areas.

The general purpose computer will continue to move to iPad-like devices where what we used to consider general purpose computers move into more specialized roles. Because of this, I’m not going to hold my breath on an iPad version of Xcode.

In this new world, developers, editors, etc. are farmers … so they need a tractor to get their work done. Apple is planning on providing tractors to those who need them and cars and trucks to everyone else as well.

Both are important, but you need to keep the distinction in mind.