Tag: internet

Screens are designed to hold attention. More accurately, I’d have to say what’s shown on screens is engineered to hold attention. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s a TV or phone. The irony is that these same screens don’t hold our attention in the same way when work needs to happen.

Working from home adds another layer of distraction to the mix. But overall, I’ve managed to control physical interruptions much better than screen/internet based ones. So I’ve had to resort to a drastic measure—forced disconnection.

This seems like a disturbing trend. This month (May 2016) two cloud backup services have gone away. Both Bitcasa and Copy sent emails saying that they’re shutting down their services.

I don’t store a lot on cloud services. Now having two of them close down in the space of a month, I think that might be a wise plan. Dropbox wants $120/yr. for 1TB. I’ll just put that money into another external hard drive or two.

I’m really starting to wonder about the wisdom of plugging everything into the internet. This also includes the need to create another online account to go with each device.

So for 2016 I’ll be asking myself the following question before buying anything network enabled:

I’m also going to guess that in most cases the answer will be “no.”

And yes, I’m going to start with the idea that network security is an afterthought in most of these things.