Seeing all the nostalgia for digital watches of the ’90s and early 2000s, following the release of retroest desk clock shaped like a large Casio digital watch, it got me thinking of the watches I owned growing up. I started off as a Casio person but I eventually moved on to Timex watches. I was pretty happy with all the watches I owned, but my favourite was the Timex Datalink USB Sports Edition, which stood head and shoulders about the rest.

Not only was this watch featureful out of the box — having the usual stopwatch, timers, and alarms — it was also reprogrammable. There was some Windows software that allowed you to install new modes and arrange them in the mode menu. I remember a few of these, such as a mode allowing you to browse data arranged in a tree; a simple note taking mode; and a horizontal game of Tetris.

There was also an SDK, allowing you to build new modes in assembly. I remember building a score keeping mode, where you could track points for a game between two or four competitors, with an optional auxiliary counter used to keep track of things like fouls. I also remember building a dice rolling mode, allowing you to roll up to 6 dice, with each dice having between 2 to 9 sides, and the total automatically being displayed to you.

I never used these modes for anything — I’m neither sporty nor much of a gamer to have any real need for tracking scores or rolling multiple dice — but they were super fun to build, and I got a fair bit of experience learning assembly from it. And the SDK was pretty well built, with predefined entry points for the mode, reacting to events like button presses, and displaying things on the LCD. The fact that the SDK came with a random-number generator, which wasn’t even used with any of the built-in modes, just showed how well Timex thought about what was possible with this watch.

This was the last watch I regularly wore: I’ve moved to using phones to keep track of time. But it was a great watch while it lasted.

Kev Quirk wrote a post yesterday wondering why people have multiple blogs for different topics:

A few people I follow have multiple blogs that they use for various topics, but I don’t really understand why. […] I personally prefer to have a single place where I can get all your stuff. If you’re posting about something I’m not interested in, I’ll just skip over it in my RSS feed. I don’t have to read everything in my feed reader.

I’ve written about this before, and after taking a quick look at that post, most of those reasons still stand. So if you’ve read that post, you can probably stop reading this one at reason number two (unless you’re listening to the audio narration of this, in which case, please listen on as that last post predated that feature 🙂).

I’m currently keeping four separate blogs: this one, one for checkins to places I’ve visited, one for remembering how to do something for work, and one for projects I’m working on¹. This arrangement came about after a few years of spinning out and combining topics to and from a single blog, generally following the tension I felt after publishing something, wondering if that was the right place for it. As strange as it is to say it, this multi-blogging arrangement gives me the lowest amount of tension for writing online.

There are a few reasons for this. First is that for certain topics, I like an easy way to reference posts quickly. This is the primary reason why I keep that work-related reference blog, so that when I’m faced with a software-related problem I know I’ve seen in the past, I can quickly lookup how I solved it. I’ve tried keeping those posts here, but it was always difficult finding them again amongst all the frequent, day-to-day stuff.

It mainly comes down to the online reading experience. Categories can only do so much, and that’s if I’m categorising posts rigorously, which is not always the case. Here, the posts are displayed in full, encouraging the reader to browse. But for my reference blog, a list of bare links works better for going directly to the post I need.

The second reason is the writing experience. For me, certain CMSes work better for certain types of posts. Micro.blog works well for micro-posts or mid-sized posts like this one, but for longer ones, I prefer the editors of either Scribbles or Pika. I don’t know why this is. Might be because all the code-blocks I tend to use on those blogs are easier to write using a WYSIWYG editor rather than Markdown.

And finally, it’s a good excuse to try out multiple CMSes. I have no rational explanation for this one: it’s an arrangement that costs me more money and requires learning new software. Might be that I just like the variety.

So that’s why I keep multiple blogs. I do recognise that it does make it harder for others to find my writing online, not to mention following along using RSS. But that’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make for a writing and reading arrangement that works better for me. Of course, like I said in my previous post, this might change in due course.

I see that Panic is shutting down their Google Drive integration in their Android app, much like iA did a few weeks ago. This doesn’t affect me directly: even though I am a user of both Android and Google Drive, I regret to say that I don’t use apps from either company on my phone (I do use a few things from both on my Apple devices).

But I do wonder why Google is enacting policies that push developers away from using Drive as general purpose user storage. That’s what Drive was meant to be used for, no? Does Google not think that by adding these security conditions, and not getting back to developers trying to satisfy them, is maybe pushing the scale between security and usefulness a bit too far out of balance? Are they thinking through the implication of any of this at all?

If you were to ask me, my guess would probably be that no, they’re not thinking about it. In fact, I get the sense that they’re making these decisions unconsciously, at least at an organisation level. Probably someone said to the Drive devision that they need to “improve security” and that their performance will be measured against them doing so. So they drafted up these conditions and said “job done” without thinking through how it may affect the actual usefulness of Drive.

And it just reveals to me how large Google is, possibly too large to know why they do anything at all. It’s not like they’re being malicious or anything: they’re a victim of their own success, with way too many product lines making zero dollars that distract them from their raison d’être, which is getting that sweet, sweet ad money. After-all, what does Drive matter to Google in terms of increasing advertising revenue? It’s probably a division making a loss more than anything else.

I suppose, given that I do use both Drive and Android, that I should care more about it. And yeah, I care enough to write about it, but that’s barely above the level of mild curiosity I’m feeling as to why Google is letting this happen. Might be that I’ve just gotten numb to Google not caring about their own products themselves.