Friday 9th June 2023

Topics:

1. Recently thinking about why the mobile phone has become our master key in life.
2. This stems from some recent test drives I done on EVs, many of which can be accessed via an app of your phone rather than a fob or key.
3. In recent years, the phone is used for:
   • COVID vaccination certs.
   • Checking in to flights.
   • Bank transaction confirmations.
   • Payments.
4. The QR Code technology technology has become something of a curse.
5. Basically, pretty much all two-factor authentication processes these days use the phone as the second factor. Why?
6. When I was in my early twenties, mobile phones had just come out, they were all basic GSM devices with monochrome LCD screens.
7. The coolest person in my social circle had no mobile, and despised how anti-social they were making people. Turns out he was right.
8. The mobile phone is now an identification and tracking device, whether we like it or not.
9. In the face of this, I see more and more people exploring the possibility of ditching the smart phone and returning to dumb phones, even younger people who never used a dumb phone before.
10. Often referred to as minimalist phones, the Light Phone is an interesting example of that: https://www.thelightphone.com/
11. This is a nice trend, however I genuinely wonder if it is possible to get through life without a smartphone anymore, given how many identification use cases depend upon it.
12. Do our devices work for us, or do we work for them?
13. What I am working on this week:
    • five.today - I fixed a bug impacted upon account activation, when the user switches devices during that process.
    • greppr.org - I greatly improved the responsive rendering of the site on mobile devices. In addition, I'm adding 20k web pages per day to the index which now stands at 1,180,457.
14. Media I am enjoying this week:
    • "Silo" on Apple+
    • Currently reading: "A Case of Conscience" by James Blish.

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techleaderpro-2023-week-23.mp3

File details: 20.6 MB MP3, 14 mins 18 secs duration.

Title music is "Come 2gether" by Ooyy, licensed via www.epidemicsound.com

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