Technology Archives - Blowing It

January 27, 2020January 27, 2020

Always Wearing Airpods. Avoiding Blowing It #247.

We Have Found Yet Another Way To Always Avoid Everyone Around Us. Constantly Wearing Airpods Everywhere We Go.

It wasn’t enough for just our eyes and mind to be always occupied by our screens. We needed more senses to be involved in our distraction. Add hearing to the list of new ways to check out of societal norms with Airpods. Comfortable Blutooth headphones that fit into each individual ear. Without cords to obstruct, people are using them as permanent accessories.

We’re only a few steps away from never ever having to talk to another individual in our lifetime and that’s a terrible thing. We need connection, simply listening to others connect on a podcast or watching a YouTuber talk to the camera is not sufficient human connection. It’s really no connection at all.

We get so addicted to these devices because it’s so much easier then actually connecting. We’re predisposed to take the easy way it’s hard wired into our DNA for survival purposes. Even though it’s not always the best thing for us and it’s usually far less rewarding. So we bury ourselves in our phones and think it’s our only access to the outside world. Even while we’re completely immersed in the outside world. We’ll still succumb to our devices where we think we have more connection. It is ruining human interaction.

So Many People Now Are Wizards At Texting Yet Complete Wet Noodles At Face To Face Interaction.

Where was the wizardry lost? It’s probably because they have no practice. They have no idea when to speak and when to listen. And it will only get worse with each technological advance that eliminates the need for personal interaction. As well as eliminating another sense. I’m sure next will be augmented reality glasses. Where you can create a completely fictitious world around you. Eliminate all the real people from view so you can finally check out into oblivion.

Be present. Turn off the screens and take your head phones out in the presence of another. Talk, even if you’re bad at. Maybe your a great listener, encourage others to talk. Let’s stop using technology so much to escape authenticity. And just know if you’re constantly wearing Airpods everywhere you go. You are kind of an ass.

March 15, 2019July 17, 2019

How Is It That We Still Use Air Filled Rubber Tires For Our Vehicles #189?

There Has To Be A Better Solution.

Ahh damn the dreaded low tires pressure light comes on again. What is it this time? Nail, screw, shards of glass? I guess just be lucky it wasn’t a complete blowout on the highway then you’d really be shit out of luck. Or worse flipped over on the side of the road.

Why is it, we still use and rely on a 1/2 inch thick piece of rubber filled with air to drive us from point A to point b? Have we ever attempted to engineer a new type of wheel one that doesn’t require air to fill it? How is it possible that rubber tires have dominated the wheel industry for a century and yet advancements in technology can’t create a new never flat tire? Possibly a honeycomb like structure that requires no air and it’s still flexible and doesn’t pop at the most inopportune moments.

Too Many Flat Tires.

Every time you get a sharp object lodged in the rubber of your tire it’s another trip to your local tire shop requiring hours. They will sometimes fix it for free, the only cost you is hours out of your day. Yet often they find that it’s not repairable and you need a new tire sometimes even new sets of tires all because one little sharp object or the rubber has worn off in just a year of driving.

Who Has An Alternative Answer?

It’s pretty ridiculous that we haven’t found an alternative yet. Is it due to Monopoly in the rubber tire manufacturing industry or is it an area that lacks focus and doesn’t have any innovation for the future? Or is it due to economics? If people’s tires always continue to wear out and they continue to purchase new ones when they do. That there is a client for life and you always have reoccurring financials.

My point here is that we need to find alternatives, we need innovation to invent new wheels, more durable tires. We need more competition in that arena. So in the future we needn’t worry when we run over the next nail.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read our post. If you like what you read, or even if you don’t, we would love to hear from you. Please join our email list here. Or if you want to comment on this article, or write your own in our Forum. Please sign in here and if you are new to the site you can register here. This website is not intended to be a blog. We want it to be a place to help others grow and learn from mistakes and the Forum is where that begins. Please tell us your stories.

December 11, 2018July 24, 2019

Don’t Wear Headphones While Charging Phone #167.

It Seems Like Common Sense To Not Wear Headphones While Charging. But Even I Was Unaware You Could Get Electrocuted And Die From An Electrical Surge.

Headphones While Charing — Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

With some chargers being so cheaply made in order to keep them as inexpensive possible. In this glut and over abundance we are bound to run into some occasions of faulty wiring. Faulty wires, which can burn up phone batteries. And apparently if you’re not careful the surge can blow right through your phone. Up through your headphones and electrocute you to death.

This very phenomenon recently happened to a 16 year old boy in Malaysia. But this is not the only occasion of this happening. All around the world there are reports of people who have died from having there headphones in there ears while charging their phone. It’s usually due to a faulty off market cell phone charger that allows a surge of electricity to come streaming through the phone.

What Are Some Better Options.

So lets err on the side of caution and never wear our headphones while charging our phone. And if we feel we absolutely have to wear headphones choose Bluetooth headphones instead. Or simply play music through the phones speaker. And lastly try not to buy off market cheap chargers. Not only can they burn up your phone they can potentially kill you if you’re not careful.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read our post. If you like what you read, or even if you don’t, we would love to hear from you. Please join our email list here. Or if you want to comment on this article, or write your own in our Forum. Please sign in here and if you are new to the site you can register here. This website is not intended to be a blog. We want it to be a place to help others grow and learn from mistakes and the Forum is where that begins. Please tell us your stories.

August 10, 2018July 2, 2019

Body Dysmorphia (Blowing It Scenario #133)

Fixating So Intently On Perceived Flaws Throughout Your Body, Is Truly A Losing Battle.

Body dysmorphia is a mental illness that involves an obsessive focus on perceived flaws in ones appearance. Many throughout the years have developed these complexes through advertisement within media. This one has fuller lips, a bigger butt, better breast, prettier eyes, more pronounced check bones, tighter skin, more chiseled abs. The list goes on and on. Fixate on any one of these things and you can send yourself down a rabbit hole of reduced body image to the point where you’re body shamming of yourself as well as others. And when you do that it perpetuates this ceaseless self inflicted harm. Harm that you could control just by accepting yourself as well as others in all our forms. When you create an environment of acceptance, all perceptions blend to create a wholesome view of the world around you. Perception is simply what you make of it. You no longer envy what others have, you are uniquely you, and they are uniquely themselves and it’s a beautiful thing. Life itself is the gift. The grass may sometimes seem greener on the other side. But value your lot higher before assessing others. You might be missing tremendous unseen worth.

Recently a story came out that more and more people were experiencing this phenomenon of body dysmorphia. It came by way of Snapchat filters that can distort your image to look like what one might perceive as better or more attractive. Like they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So individuals are getting plastic surgery in the attempt to look more like their computer generated images. It’s almost like walking into a hall of mirrors and choosing the image that best fits. Completely neglecting the authenticity of their, perfect the way it is, image. Apps are now destroying self image with the click of a button and people are buying into the lie. Don’t fall into this trap. Nor any other form of media that tells you need to be anything other than who you are. If you are easily influenced and tend to succumb to such pressures of image, avoid these sites all together. Trust me you will be far happier when you’re not worrying about what others may think of you or carrying the load of a distorted view of yourself. Instead let it go. Be happy in your skin.

It’s healthy to want to improve but there are limits to all things, moderation is key. Do it naturally do it organically and don’t base it off false perceptions of yourself and or others. Lastly as a disclaimer, those who truly have issues they need to repair on their body. This does not pertain to you. Fix what needs fixing. It’s the superficial flaws I discuss here.

August 2, 2018September 27, 2019

Not Allowing Performance Enhancing Drugs In Sports #132.

Make Sports Great Again. With Performance Enhancing Drugs.

All athletes should be able to take performance enhancing drugs. Just require them to disclose which ones they use.

If you are of the, “purest, that’s cheating in sports” camp. Than I have news for you. There is just about absolutely no original purity left in any sport. Performances are constantly being enhanced in every aspect of the game. Every year, every professional athlete, and every sporting good manufacturer. Are all out there finding new ways to edge out their competitors.

They Work Every Single Angle To Enhance Their Performance.

Better equipment, better training regiments, better technology, better statistics, better supplements, better nutrition. It all adds up. Not to mention everyone’s body chemistry is different. So one player who has more natural testosterone than another maybe able to train harder. One may have a higher IQ. Another better agility and flexibility. Some things in nature are just luck of the draw.

On Top Of That How Much More Advanced Is The Equipment These Players Use Today Than They Did Ten, Twenty, Fifty Years Ago?

Light years differences in some instances. Tennis rackets, bicycles, golf clubs, footwear, gloves, clothing, feedback monitors. The list keeps growing. Football players now use performance enhancing gloves that stick like glue to the football. Where as a player getting tackled, can still catch a ball one handed and with three fingers.

Better footwear for runners, and all sports for that matter. Along with better fabrics with less resistance. Better wicking technology, which leads to better suits for swimmers. Technology has improved in other areas such as lighter rackets for tennis players. And lighter bicycles for riders. Even better training equipment.

We’re constantly enhancing every area. Why punish a player for attempting to enhance their body unnaturally. Sure it’s with unnatural chemicals. But so are current hydration methods. Most popular beverages for athletes are filled with unnatural chemicals.

If We Want To Be Purest.

We should require all players to only drink water, only use cotton clothing, flat shoes, limited padding, maybe go back to leather helmets, or none at all. All sports golf and baseball included can use only solid heavy wood equipment. And we can go back to kicking pig blatters.

The point is everything evolves, including sports. It’s more entertaining to watch apex elite athletes get even better than what the human body is usually capable of. Maybe that’s just me but I believe performance enhancing drugs should be available to all players who are willing to take that risk to improve that much more.

July 30, 2018July 2, 2019

Automatization Of The Economy (Blowing It Scenario #131)

Machines And Robots Do Not Purchase Goods.

How will the economy function when most of the workforce can be supplanted by robots or machines? What else has the power to make life exponentially better and at the same time drastically more difficult?

That’s the conundrum with machine learning and working machines. On one hand its wonderful, a machine to drive us, one to clean up after us, another to act as our personal assistant. But if machines can do everything for us, what jobs will be left in order to make a living? We’ll have to be creative. Creativity and mastery in a skill outside the realm of automating will be your work security.

I always love the irony of the fact, that those who build the technology to supplant the workers are in essence working to put themselves out of work. If the computer programmer built a program to write code and the program now writes better code than the developers code he used to write said program. That developer programmed himself right out of a job.

Soon cars will be able to do all the driving for us with a near perfect safety record. At that point what would be the purpose of paying for vehicle insurance. Along with it traffic tickets and other fines that will be obsolete. Which is great for the general public but if cars drive themselves that would displace truck drivers which is the number one job in 48 of 50 states. Whole industries could shudder along with the their entire workforce.

There is mass disruption on the horizon but there’s really know going backwards. It’s all part of our evolutionary make up. The need to keep pushing forward and finding new horizons to discover. Who knows machines or some form of alternative life force could be the next stage in evolution. When machines have vastly superior knowledge and can move autonomously with far fewer weaknesses than the homo-sapiens we might eventually go the way of the neanderthal. I’m sure it will be long after were gone but some day something other than a human being could be reading these words. I don’t feel like it’s too outlandish of a thought.

In the meantime I believe we’ll get to a point where economics will have to address all displaced workers and if that means handing out a living wage to every single citizen than so be it. But the time might be rapidly approaching.

May 25, 2018June 1, 2018

Blowing It Scenario #104-Smart Homes And Inviting Recording Devices Into Them.

Smart Homes Of The Future Are Intended To Make Our Lives Easier But At What Cost.

Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple Home Pod, Nest Security Cameras, Amazon Security Cameras. These are all devices that can record you at anytime, unwittingly and send that information anywhere. This is what recently happened with Amazon’s Echo. A couple’s private conversation was recorded and sent to one of their contacts. This is just a small hiccup but it exposes the technology for what it truly is, a recording device to collect data on it’s users.

Simply put we invite these recording devices into our homes where we conduct our most private and intimate moments in life. And we expect these corporations that own the technology we use to just close there eyes and plug their ears while we have these moments. It’s just not how the business works, everything you do provides data, that data is then used by or sold to other companies trying to profit from your information. It’s now so invasive that the European Union recently passed the GDPR General Data Protection Regulation. Where they don’t allow these companies to track their citizens personal data. That is a step in the right direction and good for those who live in the E.U. because the rest of us have every app we download tracking our every move.

Just about every single app we now download to our phone for some reason requires access to our speaker, our camera, our personal photos, our contacts, everything. It doesn’t make any sense, and yet it makes perfect sense when your business is data driven. It’s so powerful to know when you eat, sleep, go to the restroom, what shops you frequent, what you buy, how much you drive, where you drive too, what websites you frequent, what photos you take, are you willing to tag those photos and interconnect them with others, how much exercise you get, what you talk about, what you text about. All this information is compiled into one tight little package about you. Where we can than in turn be swayed and directed into any number of funnels the powers that be want us to be shuffled into. Technology is a blessing and a curse, yes it has made our lives easier in many ways but we won’t truly know the consequences of it all because we could be on a completely different trajectory had we never been guided down the paths that our tech has guided us down.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read our post. If you like what you read, or even if you don’t, we would love to hear from you. Please join our email list here. Or if you want to comment on this article, or write your own in our Forum. Please sign in here and if you are new to the site you can register here. This website is not intended to be a blog. We want it to be a place to help others grow and learn from mistakes and the Forum is where that begins. Please tell us your stories.

May 5, 2018June 1, 2018

Blowing It Scenario #89-Is The Free Market Really Free.

Businesses Claim To Want A Free Market But When It Infringes On Their Own Profits. They Will Get The Government To Shut Others Down And Imprison. The Antithesis Of Free.

This is what happened when an incredibly talented innovator came head to head with the Microsoft juggernaut. Eric Lundgren an e-waste inventor who has built an electric car from computer scrap that out distanced a Tesla, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit goods and criminal copyright infringement. Why? Because this good samaritan who is actually doing good in the world and creating things out of our toxic junk simply wanted to supply computer refurbishers with Microsoft windows. So that when computers crash but were already licensed with windows it can easily be installed back on the computer.

He was literally trying to help people who already had the program, just get their program back on to the computer without having to buy a new license or whole new program. And here in lies the problem. That cuts into future profits which is a big no no. We can’t be having that. So we get the Government to step in and set up a sting to purchase these c.d.’s, for next to nothing. Eric had them made for 5 cents and was selling them to refurbishers for 25 cents.

This was not a money making endeavor. Yet when the corporation sells new licenses they want $25 dollars. Simply the same program you had before now cost you more money to reinstall. Businesses would like you to think they support free markets and that competition is allowed in their domain but it isn’t and free is the mortal enemy. It’s all highly controlled and if you’re big enough you can get the government to do the bidding for you.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read our post. If you like what you read, or even if you don’t, we would love to hear from you. Please join our email list here. Or if you want to comment on this article, or write your own in our Forum. Please sign in here and if you are new to the site you can register here. This website is not intended to be a blog. We want it to be a place to help others grow and learn from mistakes and the Forum is where that begins. Please tell us your stories.

April 24, 2018June 1, 2018

Blowing It Scenario #82-Too Much Screen Time.

The Belief That Interacting With a Screen Is The Same As Interacting With An Individual.

Now I’m sure most of us don’t assume this to be true, but it is how we treat most of our lives. Screens have become our intermediary to the world. From texting on our phone to social media to email. We are not having conversations with other people we are having conversations with ourselves which are directed at another and facilitated through a third party. In most cases this is our computer, phone, or tablet. As I’m writing this I’m not having a conversation with you, it’s a conversation with myself that I hope you eventually read and respond to. I’d prefer to have this conversation in person but this has a much farther reaching potential. And that is why we use this third party we call a computer.

It is what drew us to the siren song of computers and the internet in the first place. The ability to interact with millions if not billions of individuals all around the world with just some text, video, or audio, all at your finger tips with just the click of a button. We are losing our ability to communicate with others without having our intermediary devices. Our computers, phones and tablets have become our side kick, wing man, and crutch. Many now freeze up and cower at the first sign that they will have to talk in person with another individual. It’s no surprise so many claim to have social anxiety. We literally reinforce that belief with every single text or email we send. We are saying we would much rather interact through this device then have to talk person to person.

Often its the most convenient form of communication. You can send an email and the receiver can check it at their earliest convenience. But hopefully you are using it as the tool it is. And you working towards obtaining future communication in person or at the very least over the phone. Because that is what these devices were meant to be. Simply a tool to advance society and share information. Not to aggrandize our vanity or flock to our hovel only to hide behind our screen to denigrate others. It’s tool intended to better humanity, we must use it for that purpose, all else is just complicating our lives.

Further more a concern we should keep an eye on, is chat bots are becoming more and more advanced by the day. Soon you may not ever be chatting to another human on the the other end. We won’t even have to communicate with another if we don’t want to. The days of asking a friend, parent or loved one an answer to a question are already fast becoming obsolete. Why ask when you have Google, Siri, and Alexa? I’m not saying it’s all bad but like with anything that can become addictive, practicing moderation is paramount in order to not fall into the abyss. When it’s sheer terror to you to have to interact with another, it’s time to put down the device and practice relationship skills again. Oh and while your at it, call your mom more too.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read our post. If you like what you read, or even if you don’t, we would love to hear from you. Please join our email list here. Or if you want to comment on this article, or write your own in our Forum. Please sign in here and if you are new to the site you can register here. This website is not intended to be a blog. We want it to be a place to help others grow and learn from mistakes and the Forum is where that begins. Please tell us your stories.

March 30, 2018June 1, 2018

Blowing It Scenario #59-Watching Other People Play And Stream Video Games Online.

Blowing It By Wasting Time Watching Another Waste There Time.

I recently came across an article about a gentlemen who makes $500,000 a month streaming himself playing video games on the platform twitch. The fact that such a platform exist where people just play video games and upload the videos of them playing is a wild concept to me. And the fact that it’s as popular as it is, really boggles the mind. At least my mind.

I get that their is an entertainment element to it all, similar to watching sports. As I wrote that last line, I realized it’s absolutely no different then watching sports. You just don’t think of video game play as a sport, but I guess it could be considered a sport of the mind. Granted if you are not playing professionally, you are just wasting time. It’s no different then the guy who plunks himself down in front of the television for four hours to watch his favorite baseball team score three runs only to have them lose by one. It’s a complete waste of time. Just as watching another play a video game online or just playing a video game themselves is. It’s escapism, we all do it in some form or another and the reason we do it is because it feels good to get out of the rat race and out of your head and just immerse yourself in entertainment for a brief period of time. Brief being the key word.

This day in age we tend to over do it and often times we get ourselves emotionally charged in the process. We escape one reality to live in another, one that is often times worse for us then the original. When every moment spent not working or being a productive member of society is encumbered by mindless entertainment we do ourselves and our community a great disservice. We become doltish consumers where the consumption of worthless knowledge and side show spectacle is endless. We have to break free from the oppression of this attention vacuum. Do yourself some good. Create and produce. Get out of the trap, shut off the television and get offline from time to time. Go see and do. The world is a beautiful place. Explore it.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read our post. If you like what you read, or even if you don’t, we would love to hear from you. Please join our email list here. Or if you want to comment on this article, or write your own in our Forum. Please sign in here and if you are new to the site you can register here. This website is not intended to be a blog. We want it to be a place to help others grow and learn from mistakes and the Forum is where that begins. Please tell us your stories.