technologie – data

December 3, 2022November 28, 2024

Why I Will Return My Kindle Scribe

I was actually really excited about the Kindle Scribe I ordered, because it seemed to solve two problems I have with using my reMarkable:

I don’t like writing my notes at the edge of a PDF, if there is even enough margin, because my work notes are the preliminary version of the final notes that go into my Zettelkasten. Simply highlighting something is not very useful, as some studies also suggest. I need to be able to write my own thoughts on a text, and that’s something the reMarkable 2 doesn’t allow me to do.
Light 🙂

Light is available, but otherwise, the Kindle Scribe has been a very disappointing experience for me. Of course, I don’t really want to throw money into Amazon’s pockets or store my data in their cloud, but the topics of “working through paper” and “reading” are of great importance to me. Since I don’t jot down anything confidential… one must choose the lesser evil. Perhaps someday there will be a solution that works without the cloud. But how good is the Scribe really?

June 25, 2017February 7, 2025

Vorwerk Thermomix, Cook-Key, Cookidoo: Good and Bad Experiences

Last updated on July 17, 2024.

Overview

Introduction
Why a Vorwerk Thermomix at all?
The Thermomix Party system
Thermomix representative lied
Commissioning and initial experience with the Vorwerk Thermomix
The Thermomix as a data octopus
What good is the guarantee of success and guided cooking?
Conclusion: Is the Thermomix worth it?

Introduction

Either you hate him, or you love him. In between, there seems to be hardly anything on the net. Some say that you can buy something for a lot of money that you could do with a stove and good pots, others say that it is a huge relief in their lives and they don’t want to miss it anymore. We are talking about the Vorwerk Thermomix with all its accessories. This article is about the previous model of the current version, and some points have become obsolete: The WLAN module, for example, is now already included from the factory, but this was not the case with our TM5. But anyway, here is the original article!

Even after two months with the TM5, I find myself somewhere between anger about how dubious the business practices of the Vorwerk participants are in some places and what bad experiences have been made with the Thermomix, and the admission that cooking yourself is also satisfying and, above all, cheaper than delivery service, etc. The thought that you can save money by cooking more and ordering less, I can say that right away, you should get rid of it. It is very unlikely that the acquisition costs will ever be amortized,

December 6, 2014February 5, 2025

The End of Mass Employment

In the ZEIT of December 4, 2014, there is again a writing about alternative forms of economy due to the loss of jobs due to technology, this time in an interview by Uwe Jean Heuser with Jeremy Rafkin. It quotes a speech by Larry Summers from 2001, who said that the economy will see a new revolution like that of e-electrification, because marginal costs for video, audio and text information will drop to almost 0. Profits could then only be made through monopolies, but it was not yet known which system would replace market capitalism. This, according to Rafkin, is actually paradoxical, because the market economy would then have created the most efficient markets of all, but then there would be no more profits, so that an economy of sharing could emerge.

Furthermore, according to Rafkin, the Internet of Things is a tripartite division of the Internet into a communication network, an energy network and a transport network. By the transport network, he means, for example, car sharing. Sensors would create complete transparency. At the same time, long-established companies such as RWE & Co are suffering the same fate as the music industry. Rafkin also sees the danger that jobs could be lost and there could be a break in society. “The third revolution in the 21st century will put an end to mass wage and salary work. But that takes half a century. […] We can still offer mass employment for two generations because we first have to create the infrastructure for the super Internet of Things. [… Once this platform is up and running, it will be powered by analytics and algorithms and managed by a small group of supervisory boards.” Rafkin assumes that the rest of the people will then do more social work and so-called social capital will be created. For example, Thatcher & Co should be grateful for the fact that the social sectors had to learn to finance themselves. Where this leads, in my opinion, is written in many other articles in the ZEIT: It is cared for according to the cash situation in hospitals and homes, unnecessary operations, etc.

Keynes allegedly wrote as early as 1930 that technology will replace jobs faster than new ones can be created. Rather, one should embrace this opportunity in order to “free humanity from the soulless duties of the market”. We have already read elsewhere that this does not work as hoped for with the shared economy at the beginning.

November 15, 2014January 8, 2025

The whole world as competition?

When I was a little boy, every morning on my way to school, I walked past a strange shop in front of which people stood smoking and drinking beer. Most of the time most people were standing there, sometimes one or two of these people hurried away. It was only much later that I understood that this was not a shop, but an agency for day labourers. We’re talking about the late ’70s and early ’80s.

My memory came back to me when I read the article “The Whole World as Competition” by Anja Reiter in the November 13, 2014 issue of ZEIT. Reiter manages the balancing act between two sides of the coin, namely the self-determined independence of digital nomads and the inability of legislators and trade unions, who usually argue about work, to respond to this new world. At the same time, she also describes the less exciting digital jobs, for example the Mechanical Turks, who perform easy tasks for little money. More and more of these jobs, I suspect, will soon become obsolete as more algorithms have to take over. The question is, when will the jobs that require more qualifications, such as web design, also disappear?

At the height of the New Economy, whose rise and fall I witnessed first-hand, above-average incomes were awarded to those who understood at least some HTML. At that time, Bertelsmann founded its own “school” where career changers could learn web technologies and where Lycos sent masses of applicants who were then to receive a well-paid employment contract. I am no longer sure whether it was decided after the first or after the second cohort that these lateral entrants, some of whom gave up secure jobs, would no longer be needed, so that they were already dismissed from their jobs while they were still at school. Of course, this was also due to the dot-com crash, but at the same time, we had also introduced some technologies during that time that required less manual work. Only those who knew more than just HTML, for example had gotten into JavaScript or even PHP or Java, were able to survive.

Reiter’s statement in the article is that quality is still in demand in this country. Companies that had previously placed orders abroad were not satisfied with the quality delivered and booked freelancers in Germany again. I think so. My experience with Virtual Private Assistants, for example, was disastrous, which of course may also be due to the language barrier. But no one needs HTML or PHP knowledge to build an interactive website today, WordPress & Co now install almost themselves. Overall, technology will free technology from technology.

June 21, 2014January 8, 2025

Changers Solar Charger: Nice but ineffective idea

[Update: Apparently, the company no longer sells these solar chargers]

When I first saw the Changers Solar Charger, I was excited about the idea, and I’m not alone. After I had already tried a few small solar modules without success, this system actually seemed to work. Climate-neutral production is another bonus point (but you need credits for it, see below). Personally, I don’t need the connected community, but bragging about your own energy-saving performance is certainly more useful than any cat content. I also don’t need some kind of payback functionality with credits for top-ups, but it’s probably an incentive for some. All in all, a good idea. Or?

In principle, yes. But the effect is rather in the minus range. The solar module with battery costs around 150€. One kilowatt hour costs 27 cents rounded up at our “green” electricity provider Lichtblick. Let’s assume 2 charging processes a day (2 mobile phones in the household, I charge more than once a day, but then on the go), and we assume that the mobile phones are completely discharged every time (unrealistic, but easier to calculate and to the advantage of Changers). The battery of the iPhone has a battery capacity that allows a consumption of 0.0055KWh. Then we come to 2.0075 KWh for 365 days, which corresponds to 54.21 cents rounded up. With 2 mobile phones we are rounded up at 1.09€. In the year. Not per day.

We are even more precise: A charger consumes more electricity than it passes on to the battery, one speaks of about 70% efficiency. For the sake of simplicity, let’s pretend that only half of the power reaches the battery, again to the advantage of Changers. Then we would be at 2.18€ per year. We can now assume for fun that my Nexus 5 consumes twice as much power (it doesn’t), to the advantage of changers. So how many years would you have to use the solar module every day for 2 charging sessions to make it profitable to save electricity, if it actually managed to charge 2 times at all, even in winter? I doubt that the module and the battery will last that long at all. In purely mathematical terms, we are not doing the environment any favours here.

Ok, this is not just about saving electricity. But also about saving CO2, instilling an awareness of the general public about saving electricity, etc. But then you shouldn’t hide the fact that the transmission of the savings data requires WIFI, which in turn consumes electricity, and the community on Changers.com’s servers also consumes electricity. I have the impression that more work is being done here with the do-gooder feeling than with an actual environmental relief.

By the way: A refrigerator consumes hundreds of kilowatt hours per year. Buying a more efficient device can cut electricity consumption in half. In this case, the return on investment is there within a few years, not decades or half a century as with Changers. Leaving the car at home probably also helps the environment more than this solar module in 10 years. However, it’s not as convenient, and you can’t brag about it as well as in the Changers.com community.