My Nextbit Robin Android phone has NFC capabilities; for practical purposes, this means that it can, with supporting software, do for me what Apple Pay can do for an iPhone. It also means, though, that it can read the contents of other NFC devices, and it turns out that credit cards themselves, at least those with “contactless” support, fall into that category.

To explore this, I installed the Credit Card Reader NFC (EMV) app on my phone, and held my MasterCard up underneath it to be scanned.

As expected, the phone was able to read the credit card number; to my surprise, however, it also read the last nine transactions processed with the card:

So, for example, that transaction for $130.06 on March 26, 2017 is when I did the weekly grocery shop at Sobeys; it shows up on my credit card transaction report like this:

The standard that drives all of this is, I’ve learned today, called EMV:

EMV is a technical standard for smart payment cards and for payment terminals and automated teller machines that can accept them. EMV cards are smart cards (also called chip cards or IC cards) that store their data on integrated circuits in addition to magnetic stripes (for backward compatibility). These include cards that must be physically inserted (or “dipped”) into a reader and contactless cards that can be read over a short distance using radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. Payment cards that comply with the EMV standard are often called Chip and PIN or Chip and Signature cards, depending on the authentication methods employed by the card issuer.

Because I can read my transaction history from my card, anyone can read the transaction history from my card. This means that if we’re beside each other in the coffee line, you can, if you can get your card-reading-device close enough to my card, read my transaction history. It also means that every time I pay with my card, the merchant I’m paying can read my transaction history.

While this stored transaction information doesn’t appear to include anything about the merchant, there’s a lot that can be derived from my last 10 transactions. Look at mine, for example: from just those 7 transactions you can see, you can tell how often I use my card, how much I tend to charge to the card, and what countries I’ve visited (because the currency is recorded along with the amount). If I was a merchant processing hundreds of thousands of cards per day, I could skim all of this data, aggregate it, and start to develop fingerprints that would demographically tag card presenters based on their history.

As far as I can tell, there’s no way to turn this “feature” off on your card; I’m hunting for my MasterCard privacy statement to see whether it’s existence is mentioned there.

In a bizarre turn of events, I was able to increase the bandwidth of our home Internet from 20/2 to 100/10 by paying $2.95 more per month.

We’ve had Eastlink Internet here for a long time; so long, it seems, that our account type—”Edge” with 20 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up for $82.95/month—was “grandfathered.”

By paying the $2.95 more per month, we get ungrandfathered and move up to 100 down and 10 up, with no equipment change.

There was some suggestion from technical support that to do so would require using Eastlink’s wifi, but that doesn’t appear to be the case: all I needed to do was switch our AirPort Extreme from “DHCP and NAT” to “bridge” mode.

I have long been more that a little obsessed with the video Ten Bullets, from Tom Sachs. It’s a manifesto of sorts, and I live on the edge of believing in its points devotedly and feeling like it describes a sort of proto-fascist creativity prison of which I want no part.

More often than not, what wins me over to the dark side is the vigorous labeling. Of everything. In a consistent and compelling style.

The Tom Sachs approach to labeling is echoed by Casey Neistat, once a Sachs acolyte. Neistat’s studio is similarly adorned with labels:

One of the things I’ve learned from studying Sachs’s and Neistat’s studios is the importance of a low-barrier-to-entry for the labeling system. Their labels are simple “marker on holder,” without much heed paid to neatness or even spelling. A chaotically-labeled something trumps a non-labeled something every time.

Where I’ve gone wrong to this point is obsessing about neatness: my labeling system has depended on a Dymo label-making-machine that I purchased about a decade ago. It produces fine labels, but it has several shortcomings:

1. It runs on batteries. The batteries die. Then I forget whether I have batteries or not (yes, this is a recursive labeling issue).
2. It needs special Dymo-brand tape. I can never remember where I put the cartridges. And I’m always afraid I’ll use them up. And then where will I buy more?
3. The label maker has a confusing user interface, with a non-standard keyboard. Every single time I use it I have to relearned this system.
4. Once the machine spits out the labels, it’s difficult to peel the backing tape from the sticky label, to the point where I hate doing this. There was, if memory serves, a tiny tool included with the machine to make this easier, but it was quickly lost.

All of the above combine to render what should be a fine label-making system instead one full of friction: in the brief window of opportunity where my mind turns to “should I stick a label on this,” my mind quickly returns “no, that will be a pain in the ass and I’ll do it later.” In other words, never.

So, inspired by the Sachs-Neistat approach, I’ve decided to scale back on the pretty-and-neat requirement, and just go with masking tape and Sharpie, which I always have right at hand, and which don’t require batteries or function keys or tricky peeling. And so witness:

In the drawer behind that label you will find, as promised by the label, my larger notebooks (those that you won’t find on the notebook shelf nearby) and thank you cards and envelopes:

Thank you cards are important. Important enough that I printed up some custom ones, on yellow, on the letterpress. But I kept putting them in different places–places that, at the time, spoke “you will remember they are here,” but never did. And so I was forever reaching for a thank you card and not finding one and getting frustrated. Now they have a place of their own.

There’s a similar label for “Paper,” which has its own cabinet:

And for “Envelopes and Stamps” (the envelopes inside, the stamps taped to the door for easy access):

Studio organization is an ongoing process: entropy is always the wolf at the door. I’m slowly moving evermore toward perfection though.

My quantum leap today, besides the masking tape approach, was to take all of my smaller notebooks out of drawers where they were hidden away from view and find a new place for them, putting them all easily at hand:

Not only are they easily at hand, but they make a work of art in aggregate to boot.

I’ve been using the Brave web browser on my desktop and on my Android phone for many months now. Especially on the phone, it can’t be beat for speed and lack of annoying “you’ve now seen 10/10 articles this month” intermediation.

While Brave’s a snappy and well-designed browser, its killer feature is Brave Payments, a Bitcoin-driven way for users to put money into a kitty, and for publishers to get compensated from the collective kitty based on aggregate usage of their site by Brave users.

I’ve thrown money into the kitty (by sending Bitcoin through Brave’s Preferences > Payments screen), but until today I never saw the publisher side of the coin.

That’s because Brave’s description of how the system works appears to suggest that you need to pass a threshold of $100 USD in payments before they’ll set you up:

These funds grow as new micropayments are added. When contributions for a publisher exceed $100.00 USD, an email is sent to both the webmaster of the site and the registered domain owner from your WHOIS information. The email explains how to verify the ownership of your website with Brave Software.

I figured it was unlikely that I’d reached $100 in payments, or, indeed, that I ever would, so I left this thought aside.

But today I noticed that right under that paragraph is a link to Get Verified Now, and when I followed that link I was able to establish ownership of ruk.ca (through adding a DNS TXT record) and, presto, I found $4.99 waiting for me:

Not enough to quit my day job, I admit, but I’ll soon have $4.99 in hand, as I followed on, entered my Bitcoin address, and filled out an IRS W-9 form (easy to do online; just needed my name, address and SSN). My funds are due to be transferred from Brave at month’s end.

I’m fascinated by the system that Brave has built, and will be watching it closely.

Stelios Georgiades writes, in Tracing autism’s trajectories could help explain its diversity:

Much of this uncertainty stems from how we study autism. We tend to group children together based on features they share at a given point in time, and then assume that children within a particular group will share a similar developmental path. But children develop at different rates, and their individual developmental paths are rarely linear.

If you are a student of Glendenningism, this notion is one that can be applied to anyone: especially in public school we make broad, and often inaccurate, assumptions about people based on their age, their diagnoses, their behaviour, and their past experiences.

Life and learning and development are seldom linear, yet so many of the systems we’ve built assume they are.

Longtime friend-of-the-blog Valerie Bang-Jensen has a new book out this season, Sharing Books, Talking Science: Exploring Scientific Concepts with Children’s Literature.

With her co-author Mark Lubkowitz, she draws connections between literature and science, leading to the delightful conclusion that “every book has the potential to be a science book.”

From the introduction:

“I marvel at folks who can take something complex and present it as if it were common sense. I stand back and study how they break it down and present it in a manner that leaves me thinking, How come I didn’t think of this? That is exactly how I felt by the time I reached the end of the first chapter in this book. And on the last page I would have given Valerie and Mark a standing ovation had I been in their audience. This work is smart yet they make it so very accessible.”

This sensibility has a lot in common with what Robin Sloan termed the “culture of clear explanation,” and it’s a laudable thing to nurture, for if we collectively lack anything in this topsy-turvy world, it is the ability see patterns, to identify and understand systems (or to admit that we cannot understand them), and to make connections between seemingly disconnected things.

In my final year of high school I took a course called “science communications,” which was, in essence, a course about the techniques of clear explanation. For one of our assignments–the topic escapes me now–I drew a short comic strip rather than handing in the expected essay. When the marked assignments were returned, I received a poor mark with the notation that the medium I’d chosen was “not appropriate to the subject matter.” Being a cheeky lad, I used the next assignment, where we were to conduct a “demonstration” of something, to demonstrate against my poor mark, and attempted to make the case for why, in fact, a comic strip was completely appropriate to the subject matter.

Mark and Valerie’s book is, in essence, a vindication of that thesis.

You can purchase Sharing Books, Talking Science in the USA directly from the publisher; in Canada you can purchase it from Amazon.ca or from your local bookseller (ISBN 978-0-325-08774-0). You should also encourage your local teacher resource library to purchase a copy.

Oh, and you can listen to them talking about the book here (thank you to Oliver for tracking that down).

Purchased last week in Halifax at DeSerres on Barrington Street. The five pens are a nice range of thicknesses, from 0.05 mm to brush. They come in a handy carrying case. Recommended.

From A Smoother International Relocation:

If you’re wondering — shipping a 20 foot container across the Pacific (enough space for a minimalist family’s worldly possessions) takes ~6 weeks and costs ~$4k.

I would happily purchase a book that summarized the logistics of everyday life in this fashion.

On Dan Misener’s Work in Progress podcast last week there was a reference to Sketchbook Skool.

Intrigued, I looked it up, and, somewhat against type, plonked down $29 for the How to Draw Without Talent course.

I’m halfway through the course now, and the drawing below is the first one I’ve produced that comes anywhere near looking like its subject. This is all rather remarkable to me, as I truly have considered myself to have no talent for drawing, especially with a third dimension.

The course—a series of very short videos punctuated by exercises—seems almost laughably primitive on first blush. But it gets to the heart of the matter rather ingeniously: to draw something you have to see it.

Which is to say that I need to turn off the “oh, that’s Oliver” part of my brain and turn on the “that line finishes just over top of that circle” part.

It turns out that drawing things that look like the things you’re drawing has an awful lot to do simply with getting angles and proportions right. And it turns out that’s a learnable skill.

I had no idea.