I’ve found a mobile app for weather I finally like enough to be happy about paying for. Windy, best known for its website. The mobile app has extra phone features like notifications and home screen widgets. Also its UI is a little more understandable.

Windy makes a strong first impression with its colorful animation of winds. But wind speed is not that interesting to me. Windy also does an excellent job displaying radar, air quality, current thunderstorms, etc. Even weather station observations and webcams. All displayed beautifully and uniformly; that’s not easy!

But my favorite thing is the forecast view, hidden away in the website but a bit easier to find on mobile. It’s a lot of detail packed into a very small tabular display. I appreciate that it shows the full forecast by hour going out for days. Also the choice of forecast models; their website explains the options. It’s all very nerdy in the way I want. It’s not great at “weather at a glance” but is good for a deeper understanding.

Their business model seems to be a $19/mo yearly subscription. Their privacy policy is clear they won’t sell your data to third parties. The app says “we do not store your location on our servers”. Most weather apps are sleazy and sell your location to advertisers and data brokers.

Sadly they have nothing like Dark Sky’s unique microforecasts. Nothing to say “it will rain where you are standing in 7 minutes”. But they do have excellent presentation of large scale traditional forecasts.

My Starlink Internet service has gotten pretty bad; every evening I'm well under 50Mbps and some hours I only get 2Mbps. (Compare 100Mbps+ last year.) I've given up trying to stream 1080p video at night; that's a pretty dismal result for a new Internet service in 2022.

Starlink imposed major restrictions on US customers last month: 1 TB / month data cap and expected download speeds dropped from 50-200Mbps to 20-100Mbps. Details of all that on my secret blog. Note they didn't drop the price, we're still paying $110/month.

Maybe the new caps will help the congestion? I'm sympathetic to their technical problem. They have limited bandwidth and they have to share it somehow. Caps are an awkward solution; most users have no idea how much bandwidth they are using or why and thus can't control it. Starlink's caps are nice in that if you exceed the cap you just get lowered in priority, not charged money or cut off. So maybe it'll be self regulating.

My real fear is that instead of improving service the result of all this is Starlink is just going to add even more customers to an already overloaded network.

This is gonna sound silly but one of the nicest home improvements we've done recently is install a new garage door opener, the Liftmaster 87504-267. It works so much better than my old insecure garage door!

Internet access is the surprise best feature; I use it all the time. Mostly to walk in and out of the garage door without my car. There's also a keypad remote I can mount outside so someone can punch in a code to open the door. Setting this all up was easy and reliable. There's even a way to give Amazon access to open your garage for deliveries.

The opener also has a camera. I would have skipped that if I'd known, saved some money. But it's actually quite useful! If I get a notification the garage door opens I can easily see on my phone what's going on. Basic live views seem to be free, there's a subscription if you want stored video.

Ken's favorite feature is the motion sensor that turns the light on. The lights on the unit are bright, it's enough to light the whole garage without having to flip a switch. I also appreciate there's a battery backup built-in so if the power goes out I can still easily open the door. The drive itself is smooth and quiet too, belt drives are a real improvement.

The #1 upgrade you should do for an older house is a dishwasher; they got a lot better about 15 years ago. But #2 may well be the garage door opener.

Way back in 1994 I wrote an undergraduate thesis for my math degree at Reed College. It was a fun project, studying a discrete dynamic system that was an extension of the Ising model. Sort of cellular automata meets statistical mechanics. It's the only significant thing I've written that's not online (too lazy). Update July 2022: PDF is here.

A few years ago my colleagues from the Santa Fe Institute wrote a preprint from that work, Vortex Dynamics and Entropic Coulomb Forces in Ising and Potts Antiferromagnets and Ice Models. They were kind enough to list me as an author even though I barely understand half the paper! I do have the pretty pictures, though, plus a healthy appreciation of the complexity of discrete systems.

I've never met one of the co-authors, Cosma Shalizi. But thanks to his having a weblog I now know more about him than the other guys.

Starlink is oversold in North America. I've had the service since March 2021 and it's mostly great. But every evening it slows down. On bad nights I can't watch a single 1080p video stream reliably. Over half of Starlink customers report problems. Starlink's speed test app now admits "the network may be affected by slower speeds during busy hours". As if that were OK.

Overselling capacity is a common problem with American ISPs. More customers means more revenue and if customers get a crappy experience? Too bad, there's no regulation to stop them. Starlink has a serious financial challenge so of course they have an incentive to oversell. And service quality is likely to keep getting worse. Their user growth is accelerating and the new RV service means literally anyone can buy a dish now without waiting (albeit at a lower service tier.) They are adding capacity but their growth plan hinges on the troubled Starship launch vehicle.

Customers were promised better. Starlink was advertised as offering 100-200Mbps and 20ms latency; their legalese description promises 50-250Mbps / 20-40ms. My reality is speeds drop to 10-20Mbps every evening. Upload speeds are tiny, often well below 5Mbps. 20ms latency is a fantasy; 50ms is typical. And capacity is highly variable minute by minute, a technical challenge for rate limiting protocols.

The US government is giving Starlink $900M to sell rural Americans 100Mbps download / 20Mbps upload. But Starlink is delivering just a tenth of that download speed during peak hours and nowhere near that upload speed ever. I hope the FCC RDOF contract includes measured performance targets.

I am still grateful for Starlink, it's significantly better than anything else I can get in Grass Valley, CA. But they're making a business decision that's bad for customers. It's a reminder of how important it is to have Internet competition. Investing in wired infrastructure is as important as ever.

I’m back to using Goodreads but I lost my friends list, if you use Goodreads please add me as a friend.

After Goodreads lost my account I was furious and of course intended to never use it again. But to their credit, Goodreads did some extra work and managed to get me a copy of all my lost review data that I could import. And in the meantime I’d come to really miss Goodreads and decided I’d prefer to go back to using it.

After my experience I got interested in the IndieWeb idea of POSSE, Publish on your Own Site. You publish content like short updates or book reviews on your own infrastructure, then syndicate it to Twitter or Goodreads as appropriate. I like the spirit of owning your own data. But it requires you have your own infrastructure to publish to. I set up a basic Hugo blog for book reviews but it just doesn’t cut it. Goodreads offers so much more. Reviews are published in the context of a database of books, quickly crosslinked by author and genre and with publishing data and covers. Also Goodreads is social, reviews are shared with friends. That second part is why I didn’t switch to The StoryGraph; it’s a promising product but the community is small.

Still I’ve learned a hard lesson; your data isn’t safe on any cloud service. Making backups of your data is a good idea, I now have data dumps from 15 services. Although you still need a product to make that data useful. I’m still curious how Goodreads lost my data, they haven’t told me. One thing this whole debacle got me thinking is how dangerous account deletion is.

Consumer websites need to be very careful about data deletion. There's a risk of an account being hacked and deleted without the owner's consent.

The GDPR includes a right to erasure, California's CCPA has a right to delete. These are good laws, they allow an individual to require a company delete all personal data they have on someone. However this right also contains a risk. What if someone unauthorized requests the deletion? Proper deletion cannot be undone, in theory even backups should be deleted.

One solution is to delay the deletion and make every effort to contact the user before it's done. Some users might interpret the delay as the company acting poorly but I think it's an important protection against accidental or malicious deletion. Facebook has had a reasonable system for this for many years now; when you delete an account you have 30 days to change your mind. As a side effect some Facebook users keep their accounts in a perpetual state of almost-deletion, the super-logoff. Even better if the user's data is hidden while in the delete-pending state.

I don't know the legal niceties of whether a company can inject a delay. The GDPR language talks about "without undue delay", which seems to leave room for a safety net. CCPA is explicit about businesses having 45 or 90 days to "respond to a request to delete".

This whole post is motivated by my Goodreads disaster. One explanation for what happened is someone could have hijacked my Goodreads account and then deleted it to hide their tracks. At first I was outraged my data could ever be deleted. But Goodreads would be correct to do that in response to a valid request for deletion. And it looks like Goodreads will delete irrevocably immediately. (I'm not certain.) If they'd put in a 30 day delay I would have noticed in time. Speculating about this scenario made me realize that instantaneous deletion is a dangerous feature for any product.

After my Goodreads disaster I went and got dumps from every cloud service I care about that I could think to try. 13 in total, Twitter and Facebook and others. I'm impressed with the results.

The best of the data exports comes from Google Takeout. They were a pioneer in making a proper product out of data export and the Google Data Liberation Front did a lot of activism both within Google and externally to sell the idea. It's not an obvious thing for a company to do; letting customers download all their data opens the door to competitors. But it's the decent and right thing to do and it allows your power users to do complex things without much support.

Data export is also increasingly the legally required thing to do. The GDPR enshrines a right to data portability in the law governing businesses in the EU. California's CCPA also has a data access right. It's a little weaker than GDPR's but a lot of sites seem to just provide GDPR to everyone, or at least to Californians. These are excellent regulations; they protect consumers and enable competition. They do put a regulatory burden on the companies implementing them but it's not too huge and the technical infrastructure has other uses too. (Imagine, Goodreads could have backups of user data!)

One thing I hadn't appreciated is how hard it is to build something to use the data. Recreating a product like Goodreads or Gmail is a lot of work! In practice the exports seem most useful when some other commercial service is designed to import them. There's not a big ecosystem of open source tools to work with export data. Some of the data exports I got are pretty rough, low level dumps in CSV or JSON format. Then again Twitter has a whole working live webapp, you can browse and search nicely formatted tweets right from the files.

My Google data is the most valuable to me; I wrote up notes on what I found in my 67GB export. It's impressive; Takeout covers some 50+ Google products, many of which have done a thoughtful job making their exports another designed product feature. Not only did the Data Liberation Front get the company to export the data but they created an infrastructure and culture of supporting and improving those exports. It's a good thing.

Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I've never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users' data. Update: Goodreads gave me a recovered copy of my data

Do you use Goodreads? Don't trust them with your data. Protect yourself with a backup; use their data export service right now. Consider quitting Goodreads entirely. LibraryThing and The StoryGraph are promising competitors. This blog post also has some ideas on DIY indieweb alternatives.

Don't trust any cloud service with the only copy of your data. Most companies are not quite so reckless but consider what you'd miss if an uncaring company lost your data. Many of the better services have data export products; Google Takeout is fantastic, Twitter has good export, as does Facebook and Instagram and Letterboxd and others.

I've enjoyed using a product like Goodreads. My plan now is to host my own blog-like collection of all my reading notes like Tom does. It will be a lot of work to set up. Fortunately not all is lost, I happened to take a data export last July and I can recover some of the more recent data from emails they sent to my friends. It's a shame they block Archive.org.

For anyone wondering how Goodreads could have simply lost all my data, I'm wondering too! It bespeaks contempt for users. And terrible system design, services should not be able to lose data irrecoverably. The specific bug is related to my removing Twitter API access to Goodreads last week (they stopped supporting Twitter login months before). Somehow that triggered their system to delete everything. Goodreads promises me it was a true delete, the data is wiped from their database. I don't believe this: sites generally flag data as deleted, they don't actually remove it. Goodreads also ignored my request to restore my data from backup. Either they don't have backups or they can't be bothered.

I've learned a hard lesson in trusting cloud services. Unfortunately just having a copy of your data isn't enough; it's a lot of work to build a useful product. In the meantime I will be more careful about which companies I trust. Goodreads has been in decline ever since Amazon bought them in 2013. Apparently an anti-competitive purchase, not a strategic acquisition.

The best thing an individual American can do right now to fight global warming personally is to switch to electricity for all your energy needs. Your next car should be electric and your next home heater and water heater should be heat pumps. Rooftop solar is an excellent idea too.

That’s the central argument in Electrify, Saul Griffith’s new book about global warming (Amazon). He’s been talking about this for awhile; Electrify covers a lot of the same ground as his free self published Rewiring America and his Make articles.

The most interesting part of the new book isn’t the personal advice but rather his global plan for how the whole world mitigates global warming. He starts by pointing out how urgent the problem is: we have to start doing more right now, this very year, and there’s no time to wait on new technologies. Electricity is the best form of energy for transportation and storage. The basic idea is to shift from fossil fuel to electric consumption while in parallel adding more carbon-neutral electricity sources to the grid. He argues we’ll need 4x as much electricity in the US to achieve full electrification but this is a huge net gain (50%ish) in both total energy consumption and actual costs. He advocates for an effort akin to World War II mobilization to get it done, financed with low interest debt.

What I like best about his argument is it breaks the Gordian knot about “what can we do”? Electrify now and work on adding clean energy sources. I also like his holistic clarity, he really looks at whole-world energy consumption and economics. The optimism is great too. I find the argument convincing.

That being said, I also think global warming is a terrible problem that world politics won’t solve in time. We’re at 1.2C warming now. The Paris goal of 1.5–2C seems impossible. 3C seems inevitable and I suspect we’ll get to 4C at least before warming starts to reverse. That’s an enormous global catastrophe so big I think we have to consider geoengineering in parallel to decarbonizing to stave off the worst effects. As the book points out there's a risk people will see geoengineering as an alternative to decarbonization. It's not, but it might be a band-aid to give us time to get CO2 under control.