iSpective

Igor on tech and life

No more blobs

emoji, google, tech |

Old-blobs

Almost a year passed since Google announced they are switching away from their personal perspective on emojis. I'm not a very frequent Android user but I've used blobs in Hangouts a lot. First I hated them, but then I realized they are pretty unique in the world of expressing emotions with a perfectly round smilies. This week Google finished the transition and replaces the blobs with their new set of emojis:

New-blobs

The reason behind the change was to make their collection more consistent after few substantial additions over the years and also to introduce reusable components (like eyes, mouths) and colors for future emojis. Google goes into all the interesting details about the change. And even though I get the idea behind the transition, it's another loss of character in favor of standardization, and preferring polish over sloppiness where it doesn't have to be:

Blob-history

First positive reason approaching 30

life |

Soon-30

Time goes fast. When I was 16 and just finished school I could never envision I'll ever get to this point. Thirty sounded so far and unreachable. When I got my 'quarter of the century' Birthday I felt it - 30 is just 5 years away. Since then each day this number approached noticeably faster than before. And not even on a daily basis - every half year passes in a blink of an eye.

Coming from a ex-soviet country where people were getting families and kids at a reasonably early age, we had a belief of achieving everything before 25-30 or die trying. I'm sitting here alive, but definitely far from having achieved everything, when this important age is not even on the horizon, it's right in my face.

Putting aside my personal pressure from this day coming, today I learned the first thing that gives me a glimpse on a bit brighter future. I was looking a car hire site, and they had a really nice rental option - for just 20% more money than the cheapest option you get a substantially nicer car to drive. And not just any car, but a Jag, which for unknown reasons I'm really found of since being those 16 years old. The other related positive moment of an older age is actually to be able to afford renting the car, when as a teenager the only thing you could afford was riding buses, and even that was a gift from your parents 🙂

Getting back to rentals - the only condition separates me from driving a Jaguar is... that I'm not 30 years old yet 🙂 This is actually a known limitation for car rentals since insurance companies won't insure expensive cars being driven by people younger that age. The same thing happened with me last year while I was visiting few awesome friends in California. I had to jump through hoops to be able to reach a Tesla owner on Turo in order to persuade him to lend me his car outside of the platform since Turo also requires to be 30+ to rent cars from the higher price tiers. I even couldn't PM the owner because I confirmed my real 'below 30' age before. But I still could get ahold of him in one of his other rentals with lower age requirements 🤓

Thinking 'Summer is 1/3 through' was also disappointing till some point. Now I'm thinking, 'yay, 1 months less to iOS 12 public release!' 😬

What are your benefits of reaching this age?

Enable emojis in Aegea

web, development |

This blog was running on the beautiful Aegea. But in the latest version (Version 2.7, build 3254) at the time it lacked one feature we can't imagine our life today - emojis 🙂

When you try creating or updating a post with some nice 👻 they will be both shown and saved to the database as '?' (question marks).

Until there is an official fix, here's a hacky solution. I spent a whole day going through obfuscated code, so you won't have to. 🙂
In core.php apply these changes:

  1. Change
    >$w8e815='utf8';
  • to
    $w8e815='utf8mb4';
  1. And remove this line:
    $e1cb25=rff7c($e1cb25);

If the changes above won't help, try adding this in /etc/mysql/my.cnf and restarting mysql:

[client]
default-character-set = utf8mb4

[mysql]
default-character-set = utf8mb4

[mysqld]
character_set_server=utf8mb4
collation_server=utf8mb4_unicode_ci

In case you're wondering on which stack this does work - I'm on php 7.0, nginx 1.10.3, mysql 5.7.22, ubuntu 16.04.

Happy blogging! 😎

Why Apple Pay sticker deserves to be 4x size of Visa’s

analytics, mobile |

Apple-Pay-Sticker

Huge Apple Pay sticker recently added below other payment methods

Less than two weeks ago (June 19, 2018) Apple Pay launched in Poland.
And yesterday I noticed a huge Apple Pay sticker on one of the self-checkout point in a local store selling household items.

Apple-Pay-Sticker2

First I noticed the sticker wasn't incorporated into the machine's aesthetics and was added later, probably because the machine was assembled before Apple Pay got introduced. Second thing I noticed there was no Android/Google Pay/Wallet. Last stop - take a look at the size of that Apple Pay's logo - it's huge! and bigger than 2 Visa and 2 MasterCard logo's combined.

The size difference isn't accidental, and it shows the significance of this payment platform before others, even the long-standing traditional ones.

Everything goes mobile, so are the payments. But again, why's there no Google Pay sticker then? Especially when in 2017 out of the 8.8 million phones sold in Poland only 8.5% were iOS devices and a whopping 91.5% were Android.

If you consider Poland's population with almost 38 million people, the mobile usage penetration of 81% you can extrapolate the the numbers above and get:

  • 30.78 M Poles on average have a mobile phone
  • 28.16 M (91.5%) of them are running Android
  • 1.62 M (8.5%) have iOS phones

Please keep in mind though - the figures above aren't really precise, and aren't taking into account cases when one person may have more than one phone, another may have no phone at all, so you can't consider each device as a potential means of payment. Many of the sold devices don't support NFC (used for the payments) either. All numbers exclude smart watches (iOS an Android) and Macs - all enabled with the competing payment systems. Also there are no Windows Mobile numbers, not that anyone buys those anyway ?

What striked me more than the fairly usual market shares are the results of Apple Pay's rollout. In the first 10 days the unofficial number of new Apple Pay users reached 200 000 people! Which is 12.3% of the whole iOS userbase! When out of 28 million Android users within more than 1.5 years a total of 300 000 people (with a mere 1.1%) enabled Google Pay.

As one of the commenters to the news topic said:

Adoption rates proves that Apple has an army, not just a bunch of customers

Which is true and definitely drives the rates. If you ask me, my bank wasn't in the first 8 banks ready at day one, so I went to another one, opened an account there and joined the service.

Bold business

business, wwdc |

While reading Twitter of developers who went to this year's WWDC I noticed all of them mentioning some scooters laying on the streets all over the city. Then I saw this video in my YouTube's recommendations.

I think it's a brilliant business idea and a very bold one - you don't ask anyone for permission, you don't necessary create a business plan and meetings. You just litter the streets with scooters. Of course you need to have initial money for something like that, and you should be prepared for few of those being stolen or broken, so not everyone can replicate such 'entrance' to the market. But this is a nice example of how bold ideas are made and how much deserved buzz they are getting for doing that.

On the WWDC episode of ATP the hosts share what they think of it, and in my opinion their thoughts nicely demonstrate the process of the buzz building up. Here are quotes of the hosts' thought process from the show:

  1. What are those, they are everywhere
  2. People riding them are jerks
  3. There are three scooters just on the road!
  4. Maybe I should try one
  5. Let's give it a shot, why not
  6. Sign up in the app
  7. Get scooter
  8. Whoa, whoa, holy shit
  9. These things are really fast
  10. These is really fun!
  11. These has to be a good thing
  12. This should be illegal
  13. Everyone should try it before they become illegal
  14. There's no way in a year this would be legal
    And eventually they want to share their experience.

That's a nice example what makes people talk about your product or service. But more important is that you have to put it in front of their face for them to notice it. And that's a whole another topic to discuss.

Kindness to foreigners

travels |

Kindness-to-foreigners-2

Every time I go to Russia by car I notice one interesting behavior. When I ask to merge or turn, most of the drivers give me the way almost instantaneously, no one’s honking if it took me some time on the traffic light to start the movement, and overall people on the road are nice and friendly.

But everyone who lived in Russia or any other post-Soviet country for a few years knows how people actually drive there. Drivers are rude, impatient, and rarely would be sympathetic to others… except foreigners.

The reason here is probably due to our double standards. We think foreigners aren’t a threat for us since you don’t have to compete with them for a better living. That’s why they receive our best treatment. And people surrounding us each day are our ‘fierce competitors’, even though we’re essentially in the same boat with them unlike with those who come to us for a short visit.

I can only imagine how much better world we would be living in when we could give to people surrounding us the same amount of kindness as to foreigners.