Soapbox on Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Fragmentation comes for Software

Fri, 08 May 2026 19:41:00 +0000

Until the 1970s, there were only four TV networks in the US. Then cable led to an explosion, from 28 in 1980, 79 in 1990 to well over a thousand today. Part of this was cheaper distribution via cable, but also because technology like computer video editing reduced the cost of production.

The flip side of this explosion was a fragmentation of audiences. The big four networks went from having 20-30% of the population and 80-90% of prime-time TV viewership to 20-30% prime time audience and low single digits of the population. This had all sorts of consequences, including politically as there is no longer a widely shared frame of reference, or someone like Walter Cronkite to tell Nixon the Vietnam War was over and lost.

Moving away from Apple platforms, a living diary

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 11:25:00 +0000

My first computer was an Apple ][+ in 1981. The first computer I purchased with my own money was a Mac Plus, circa 1990. Then I discovered Linux in 1991 and switched. When Apple introduced Mac OS X, I purchased an iMac G4, and over time transitioned fully to the new UNIX-based Mac. I also got the first iPod, iPhone and iPads, so I could fairly be accused of being an Apple fanboi, even if I have never been blind to the platform’s limitation and Apple’s questionable business practices.

Apple privacy checklist

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 22:17:00 +0000

Apple claims to hold privacy at its core, but it has been an advertising company for at least a decade, and now that smartphone and computer sales are plateauing and new products like the Apple Vision Pro have failed to set the world on fire, Services revenue (an euphemism for the 30% App Store tax on developers and advertising) is critical to maintaining the company’s stock price.

Recent behavior from Apple has confirmed Google or Meta’s take that Apple’s privacy claims are just that, clever marketing to obscure the fact the privacy measures they do have are mainly there to stymie its competitors:

PSA: LinkedIn single-sign-on dangers

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 13:35:00 +0000

I have a work-issued computer that I keep rigorously separate from my personal stuff. It belongs to my employer and thus I do not keep personal files on it, or access personal email and certainly don’t save personal passwords on it. I even have it on a separate VLAN on my home network.

This is why I was horrified when I went to the LinkedIn website on my work computer (to look at a colleague’s posting) and it automatically started a single sign-on with my company’s GMail (my work address is of course linked to my LinkedIn profile).

On the bugginess of El Capitan

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 18:14:18 +0000

I never updated my home Mac Pro to El Capitan. To paraphrase Borges, each successive Apple OS release since Snow Leopard makes you long for the previous one. Unfortunately I have no choice but to run the latest OS X release on my work Macs as that is usually required to run the latest Xcode, itself required for the App Store.

I did not realize how bad El Capitan was until I upgraded my work iMac (27-inch 5K model) to Sierra last week. Previously, I would experience a mean time between crashes of around 3 days. I thought it was flaky hardware (the problems started from when I unboxed the computer), but couldn’t find the time to take it to the Genius Bar. I had also experienced the same problem with my old home 2009 Nehalem Mac Pro, which I had taken to the office, in fact that’s why I bought the iMac in the first place (and the first one I ordered had to go back because of defective pins in the RAM expansion slots). The Mac Pro had previously been rock-steady at home.

Avoiding counterfeit goods on Amazon: mission impossible?

Thu, 12 May 2016 19:15:01 +0000

I mentioned previously that I seldom shop for electronics on Amazon.com any more, preferring B&H Photo whenever possible. I now have another reason: avoiding counterfeit goods.

My company boardroom is in an electromagnetic war zone—dozens of competing WiFi access points combined with electronic interference from the US-101 highway just outside make WiFi reception tenuous at best, and unusable more often than not. To work around this, we set up a wired Ethernet switch, and since most of our staff use MacBook Airs, Apple USB Ethernet adapters purchased from Amazon. When I side-graded from my 15″ Retina MacBook Pro to a much more portable 12″ Retina MacBook, I wasn’t able to connect using the dongle, and the name of the device was interspersed with Chinese characters. At first I thought it was an issue with my Satechi USB-C hub, but I experienced the same problems via a genuine Apple USB-C multiport adapter as well.

ArtisanState review

Wed, 11 Mar 2015 21:29:31 +0000

I seldom print photos any more. When I do, I prefer to make photobooks, as the format is way more convenient than loose prints, takes little space, and looks more polished than a traditional photo album.

Unfortunately, most photobooks are printed on HP Indigo digital presses, which use a technology somewhat similar to a laser printer, but capable of better quality photo reproduction. Indigo presses were originally designed to produce personalized junk-mail, not high-quality photo reproduction, and the quality, while decent, is not at the same level as that of true RA-4 photo paper exposed with a laser or LED light source as done by most digital minilabs (e.g. Fuji Frontier or Noritsu QSS) or higher-end imaging systems like the Océ/Cymbolic Lightjet or Durst Lambda.

The slow decline of Amazon Prime

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 21:45:52 +0000

I have been an Amazon Prime customer since it was introduced, almost a decade ago in 2005. They recently raised the price to $99, which is not unreasonable given inflation and the rise of fuel and shipping costs. Unfortunately, the service has also degraded, and I am considering dropping it for that reason.

It really hit me this week. I ordered a bunch of loupes from eBay last weekend, as Schneider stopped manufacturing them 2 years ago and they are now officially listed as discontinued, and old-new stock of other reputable makers like Leica, Cabin/Mamiya or Rodenstock are starting to dwindle. At the same time, I ordered a few items using Amazon Prime (5 orders in all, 3 from Amazon themselves, 2 from third-party vendors but fulfilled by Amazon). All my eBay items have already arrived, including some shipped all the way from Canada that arrived yesterday, but only one of the Amazon items has arrived. Something is seriously wrong when Amazon’s vaunted logistics cannot match individual sellers on the fleabay.

Externalities again

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 00:29:40 +0000

I just wasted half an hour of my life on the phone with my credit card company’s fraud department, as someone attempted to buy expensive tickets from an airline in Panama. Most likely my card number was compromised by Target, although it could also be due to Adobe.

It is actually surprising such breaches do not occur on a daily basis—the persons paying for the costs of a compromise (the card holder, defrauded merchants and their credit card companies via the cost of operating their fraud departments) are not the same as those paying for the security measures that would prevent the said breach, a textbook example of what economists call an externality. There are reputational costs to a business that has a major security breach, but they are occurring so often consumers are getting numbed to them.

The real electromagnetic emissions danger

Thu, 26 Dec 2013 16:37:59 +0000

I live 1.2km away from Sutro Tower in San Francisco. At my wife’s request I was trying to calculate the safe radius at which emissions from the transmitters at Sutro Tower are of the same power as a cell phone held a meter away, with back-of-the-envelope calculations using the inverse square law and Wikipedia’s table of radio powers.

I was shocked to find out the total power from the transmitters is about 8 megawatts, not in the kilowatt range I was expecting, and once reached 29MW. For comparison, the power of France’s first-generation PWR nuclear reactors is 900MW, and a typical cellular tower is 100W to 500W. If I use 2W as the reference, this yields a “safe” radius of 2km, which excludes many desirable San Francisco neighborhoods like Twin Peaks, Forest Hill or Noe Valley (click on the map to expand).