At one point as I climbed the stairs and approached the second floor, I saw a group of five people wearing Google Glass, all silently staring off into space. I couldn’t tell if they were wirelessly having a conversation through their eyeballs, or just bored by the presence of real humans in front of them.

Nick Bilton writes from the Google I/O 2013 conference.

I love new technology. I love lots of new things Google is doing. But Google Glass scares me because people already disappear from reality into their phones — and that’s with a physical thing they have to make a choice to pull out of their pockets and use. And these are decidedly non-tech people.

Imagine giving those same folks even more immersive, distracting technology that they don’t have to make any sort of obvious external signal that they’re using? At least right now when some dumb parent drives through a school zone with their face down in their phone, you know what they were doing.

If they’re wearing a pair of Google Glass(es), you’d have no idea.

I think a lot of the new stuff we’re being sold in technology is too powerful for the average person. At least on a societal level. It’s like giving a 16 year old a brand new Ferrari for their first vehicle. Or maybe a loaded up semi truck.

And parents can’t teach their kids about proper phone/device usage etiquette because they don’t know how to handle it either.

As someone who loves new technology it worries me how poorly I see people handling and coping with new technology as it invades their lives. And it scares me that it often feels like I, the guy who loves new technology, am the only one noticing it.

It should be the other way around, no?

See also: Technology is Evil, Long Live Technology.

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And while we’re at it, here’s Harrison Ford refusing to answer Star Wars questions on Kimmel:

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Via DaringFireball.net

I was hoping you could give me some tech advice/suggestions: how do you back up your work? External hard drives, I’d imagine? Do you store them on DVDs as well or is that antiquated? My one and only external hard drive decided to quit working today and I store ALL of my stuff (including computer backups) on it. I’m kind of freaking out. I can mount it temporarily but there’s a lot of GBs on there that would take hundreds of disks to back up to. So would it make sense to back up my external hard drive with another external hard drive? I need something that makes the most sense, is cheap, and takes little space on my desk. Please help!

My advice to Crystal went something like this:

• Bite the bullet and buy another hard drive. $130 or so for plenty of space to back up your data. Having local backup that you can quickly access if you need to is important. Plus with Time Machine running you can very easily grab a previous version of a document if you make a mistake on one file — rather than having to re-install everything to get it back.
• I use a paid Dropbox account to store all my client files (images, HTML/CSS files, contracts, meeting notes, etc.). Besides being an offsite backup, it makes it really easy to access something on my iPhone with the iOS app.
• Finally I use Backblaze to keep a backup of my MacBook Air. Backblaze operates in the background, continuously backing up everything important on my laptop. Since I have a Time Machine backup hard drive at home connected to our iMac that I only occasionally connect to my Air, it’s nice to have another backup running in case a week or two goes by.

Backup. Backup. Backup.

May 26th is when we sign up for Netflix again I guess.

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First, you must obliterate any notion that words can be divided into good and bad. Any words can be used to good or bad effect. Curse words are strong words, not bad words, but they are susceptible to being made weak and dumb through overuse. To teach this is far more challenging than it might seem, because every other part of the world in which we seek to raise our children into decent adults is working against you here. And if your children inhabit that world without obedient awareness of the line between good and bad words, they will encounter constant friction.

Too many good lines from this post on Medium by Geoff Barnes about how to teach your kids to curse properly.

One more:

When you do curse, settle for nothing less than your very best. Whether an understated monotone curse or an animated swear fiesta, show respect for the form.

Go read it. And yes, it should go without saying that there are a few swear words in the article.

I use Apple’s own Remote Desktop, $79.99 , which works great but doesn’t have an iPhone/iPad client.

Enter Screens

Screens VNC is what I’d buy if I had it to do all over again. And both their Mac and iOS apps are 50% off right now. Screens VNC for Mac is $14.99 and Screens VNC for iPhone and iPad is $9.99 right now during their sale.

With iCloud syncing of all your bookmarked computers it would make it simple to log in and update, fix or check on any of your Macs, Windows or Linux PCs.

Video Review

Check out iMore’s review of Screens for iOS below to see how it works.

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It isn’t only that young people are kept awake by messaging their friends or using the internet. The light from the screen, held close to the face, is physically disruptive to the natural onset of sleep.

From BBC News: Lack of sleep blights pupils’ education.

I hear of a lot of people who complain about not being able to sleep and then talk about how when they can’t sleep, they stick a bright, flashing, animated light up close to their face as if that’s going to help.

As Dr. Karrie Fitzpatrick is quoted as saying in the article:

Having a computer screen that is eight inches away from your face is going to expose you to a lot more light than watching a television on the opposite side of the room.

I’m not saying you can’t ever use an iPhone before bed — I do it all the time reading articles I’ve queued up in Instapaper — but I don’t complain about a lack of sleep and then not look at the most obvious reason shining right in my face. ¹

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For anyone who doesn’t understand, visit Wikipedia, watch a movie or two or watch a whole bunch of tv.

Systrom downplays the idea that this courtship was in any way remarkable. “I think everyone thinks that the acquisition was made in a dark room with Trent Reznor music playing. Do you know what I mean? Like there was some dramatic thing,” he says, referencing a scene from The Social Network. “And it turns out that some of the biggest decisions get made relatively quickly, without much fanfare.”

Kara Swisher at Vanity Fair.