Category: Personal

Unnecessary, but required

In the past year, I’ve hard to learn quite a few different lessons, some harder than others, some more gratifying than others. One of the main (but far from the only) source of these lessons was learning to live with someone else — save for my mother, and a few months with Luca, I have never really shared an apartment, a flat, or a house with someone else for more than a few days. But now that I’m happily married, there’s no going back to solitude. And it’s a feeling I’m really happy about, despite the eventual challenges that this has brought to both of us.

One of the differences that we realised early on is that we have different tolerances to chaos and trinkets. I’m not particularly organised when it comes to sorting out my stuff, but I’m also not a total slob — but I don’t mind having items spread across three rooms, and I was not particularly well known for having ironed t-shirts. My wife’s much less… chaotic, but at the same time has a fairly short patience for technology for the sake of technology.

This pretty much makes a dent in the amount of random gadgets I end up buying for the sake of trying out, because they might just end up not being used, or even not being welcome if they somehow get in the way. I think my most impressive achievement has been making her accept we have an electric cheese grater. I’m still trying to convince her it’s a good idea for me to disassemble the battery charger to replace the current plug-in adapter with an micro-USB port. Which is honestly not necessary at all: the plug is an AC-DC adapter, europlug with one of those europlug-to-british screw-in adapters, which means if we decide to leave London for the Continent, we won’t be needing to replace it — it would only become an issue if we moved to a different part of the world, and we can address it then.

But at the same time, this is the type of modification that in my eyes is… well, required. Why would I not make my electric cheese grater into an USB-powered electric cheese grater?

This reminded me of what Adam Savage (of Mythbuster fame) says in his biography Every Tool’s A Hammer (which, incidentally, is an awesome read that I would recommend everyone who has even a passing interest in creating stuff):

I often describe myself as a serial skill collector. I’ve had so many different jobs over my lifetime […] that my virtual tool chest is overflowing. Still I love learning new ways of thinking and organizing, new technqiues, new ways of solving old problems. […] The skills I have, all of them, are simply arrows in my mental quiver, tools in my problem-solving tool chest, to achieve that thing. […] And I learned each of them specifically for that reason. […] Eventually, […] I came to realise this was the ONLY way I could successfully learn a skill—by doing something with it, by applying it in my real world.

Adam Savage, Every Tool’s A Hammer

This is pretty much my life. I have pretty clearly failed at learning things “academically”, lasting only a few weeks at University of Venice, and instead building up my knowledge by working on different projects, both opensource and for customers, and by trying things out for myself. This has been a blessing and a curse at same time: while it meant that I have been collecting a bunch of skills, just like Adam is saying above, for the most part I have superficial skills: I’ve only rarely had to go deep-dive into a technology or a problem in my dayjob, and the amount of time I have to spend on side projects has been fairly low, and shrinking.

Long are the the days gone when I could sit down to write a stupid IRC bot in Qt, just because I could, and not just for the lack of time. It’s also because, for the most part, I keep telling myself it’s a bad idea to work on something low level, when someone else already did it better than I could possibly do — which is likely true, but it fails to meet my requirement to add the skill to my repertoire. And that’s by itself a career-limiting move, comparable to to the bubble problem.

With these issues in mind, I’m definitely glad my wife is understanding on why I sometimes spend money, time, effort (or most likely, all three) just to get something done because I want to, and not because there’s much need for it. It’s unnecessary, but required for me to keep up to scratch. And being able to do that, without upsetting my partner despite the chaos it creates, is a significant privilege.

As well as privilege is being able to afford the time, space, and money for all these projects. I think this is, for the most part, something that is not quite clear out there yet: being able to contribute to opensource, to write up tips and tricks, to document how to do things are privileges. And I think it’s important to share this privilege, even in form of tips, tricks, videos, and blogs — which is why this blog is still existing, and even with ever-shortening spare time I try to write updates.

Whether it is Bigclive on YouTube, with sometimes off-colour comments that make me uncomfortable, or Adam Savage’s own Tested, that can rely on a real, professional shop, or Micah’s most awesome electronics reverse engineering channel, or Foone’s Twitter feed, I am very glad for those who do their best to share knowledge — and I don’t really need to know why they are doing it. Even when it doesn’t really help me directly (because I can’t learn something if I don’t try myself), I know it can help someone else. Or inspire someone else (or in some cases, me) to go and try something, that will make them learn more.

Abbott, the Libre 2, and the takedown

A few people today messaged and mentioned me on twitter regarding the news that Abbott has requested the takedown of something related to their Libre 2. I gave a quick hot take on this on Twitter, but I guess it’s worth having something in long form to be referenced, since I’m sure this will be talked about a lot more, not least because of the ominous permalink chosen by Boing Boing (“they-literally-own-you”) and the fact that, game of telephone style, the news went from the original takedown, to Reddit phrasing it as “Abbott asserts copyright on your data”, which is both silly and untrue.

So let’s start with a bit of background, that most of the re-posters of this story probably don’t know much about. The Libre 2 is an upgrade on the FreeStyle Libre system that I wrote a lot about and that I use daily. It comes with both a reader device and with support in the LibreLink app for both Android and (on more recent iPhones) iOS. The main difference with the Libre system is that the sensors provide both NFC and BLE capabilities, with the ability to proactively notify of high- or low-blood sugar conditions, that the old NFC-only sensors cannot provide, which is more similar to CGM solutions like Dexcom‘s.

In both the Libre and Libre 2 systems, the sensors don’t report blood sugar values, like in most classic glucometers. Instead they report a number of “raw” values, including from a number of temperature sensors. There’s a great explanation of these from Pierre Vandevenne, here and here. To get a real blood sugar measurement, you need to apply some algorithm, that Abbott still refines. The algorithm is what I usually refer to as “secret sauce”, and is implemented in both the reader’s firmware and the LibreLink app itself.

Above I used the word “something” to refer to what was taken down. The reason why I say that is that Boing Boing in the title straight up calls this a “tool” — but when you read the linked post from the affected person, it is described as “details of how to patch the LibreLink app”. Since I have not seen what the repository was before it was taken down, I have no idea which one to believe exactly. In either case, it looks like Abbott does not like someone to effectively leverage their “secret sauce” to use in a different application, but in particular, it does not look like we’re talking about something like glucometerutils, that implemented the protocol “clean”, without derivation off the original software.

Indeed, Boing Boing seems to make a case that this is equivalent of implementing a file format: «[…] just because Apple’s Pages can read Word docs, it doesn’t mean that Pages is a derivative of MS Office.» Except that it’s not as clear cut. If you implemented support for one format by copying the implementation code into your software, that actually would make it a derivative work, quite obviously. In this case, if I am to believe the original report instead, the taken down content were instructions to modify Abbott’s app — and not a redistribution of it. Since I’m not a lawyer, I have no idea where that stands, but it’s clearly not as black-and-white as Boing Boing appears to make it.

As I said on twitter, this does not affect either of my projects, since neither is relying on the original software, and are rather descriptions of the protocols. They also don’t include any information or support for the Libre 2, since the protocol appears to have changed. There’s an open issue with discussion, but it also appears that this time Abbott is using some encryption on the protocol. And that might be an interesting problem, as someone might have to get up close and personal with the code to figure that part out — but if that’s the case, we’re back at needing a clean-room design for implementing it.

I also want to quote Pierre explicitly from the posts I linked above:

[…] in the Libre FRAM, what we are seeing is a real “raw” signal. While the measure of the glucose signal itself is fairly reliable, it is heavily post-processed by the Libre firmware. Specifically – and in no particular order – temperature compensation, delay compensation, de-noising… all play a role. That understanding and, to some extent, my MD training, led me to extreme caution and prevented me from releasing my “solution”, which I knew to be both incomplete and unable to handle some error conditions.

The main driver behind my decision was the well known “first do no harm” (primum non nocere) motto, an essential part of the Hippocratic Oath which I symbolically took. I still stick by it today. […]

[…]

Today, there are a lot of add-on devices that aim to transform the Libre into a full CGM. To be honest, in general, I do not like either the results they provide or their (in)convenience. None of those I have tried delivered results that would lead to an approval by a regulatory agency, none of them were stable for long periods of time. But, apparently, patients still feel they are helpful and there is now a thriving community that aims at improving them.

Pierre Vandevenne

While I have not sworn a Hippocratic Oath myself, I have similar concerns to Pierre, and I have explicitly avoided documenting the sensors’ protocol, and I won’t be merging code that tries to read them directly, even if provided.

And when it comes to copyright issues, I do weigh them fairly heavily: they are the fundamental way that Free Software even works, by respecting licenses. So I will prefer someone to provide me with the description of Abbott’s encryption protocol, rather than an implementation of it where I may be afraid of a “poisonous tree.”

Environment and Software Freedom — Elitists Don’t Get It

I have previously complained loudly about “geek supremacists” and the overall elitist stance I have seen in Free Software, Open Source, and general tech circles. This shows up not just in a huge amount of “groupthink” that Free Software is always better, as well as in jokes that may sound funny at first, but are actually trying to exclude people (e.g. the whole “Unix chooses its friends” line).

There’s a similar attitude that I see around environmentalism today, and it makes me uneasy, particularly when it comes to “fight for the planet” as some people would put it. It’s not just me, I’ve seen plenty of acquaintances on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere reporting similar concerns. One obvious case is the lack of thought given to inclusion and accessibility: whether it is a thorough attack of pre-peeled oranges with no consideration to those who are not able to hold a knife, or waste-shaming with the infamous waste jars (as an acquaintance reported, and I can confirm the same is true for me, would fill up in a fraction of the expected time just from medicine blisters).

Now the problem is that, while I have expressed my opinions about Free Software and activists a number of times in the past, I have no experience or expert opinion to write a good critique of environmentalist groups, which means I can only express my discomfort and leave it to someone else. Although I wrote about this in the past.

What I can provide some critique of, though, is an aspect that I recently noticed in my daily life, and for which I can report directly, at least for a little bit. And it goes back to the zero-waste topic I mentioned in passing above. I already said that the waste produced just by the daily pills I take (plus the insulin and my FreeStyle Libre sensors) goes beyond what some of the more active environmentalists consider appropriate. Medicine blisters, insulin pens, and the sensors’ applicators are all non-recyclable waste. This means that most of the encouragement to limit waste is unreachable for most people on medications.

The next thing I’m going to say is that waste reduction is expensive, and not inclusive of most people who don’t have a lot of spare disposable cash.

Want a quick example? Take hand wash refills. Most of the people I know use liquid soap, and they buy a new bottle, with a new pump, each time it finishes. Despite ceramic soap bottle being sold in most homeware stores, I don’t remember the last time I saw anyone I know using one. And even when my family used those for a little while, they almost always used a normal soap bottle with the pump. That’s clearly wasteful, so it’s not surprising that, particularly nowadays, there’s a lot of manufacturers providing refills — pouches, usually made with thinner, softer plastic, with a larger amount of soap, that you can use to either refill the original bottles, or to use with one of those “posh” ceramic bottles. Some of the copy on the those pouches explicitly state «These refill pouches use 75% less plastic per ml of product than a [brand] liquid handwash pump (300 ml), to help respect the environment.»

The problem with these refills, at least here in London, is that they are hard to come by, and only a few, expensive brands appear to provide them. For instance you can get refills for L’Occitane hand wash, but despite liking some of their products, at home we are not fond of their hand wash, particularly not at £36 a litre (okay, £32.4 with the recycling discount). Instead we ended up settling on Dove’s hand wash, which you can buy in most stores for £1 for the 250ml bottle (£4/litre). Dove does make refills and sell them, and at least in Germany, Amazon sells them for a lower per-litre price than the bottle. But those refills are not sold in the UK, and if you wanted to order them from overseas they would be more expensive (and definitely not particularly environmentally friendly).

If the refills are really making such a difference as the manufacturers insist they do, they should be made significantly more affordable. Indeed, in my opinion you shouldn’t be able to get the filled bottles alone at all, and they should rather be sold bundled with the refills themselves, at a higher per-liter price.

But price is clearly not the only problem — handwash is something that is subjected to personal taste a lot since our hands are with us all day long. People prefer no fragrance, or different fragrances. The fact that I can find the whopping total of two handwash refills in my usual local stores, that don’t cost more than the filled bottle is not particularly encouraging.

Soap is not the only the thing for which the “environmentally conscious” option is far from affordable. Recently, we stumbled across a store in Chiswick that sells spices, ingredients and household items plastic free, mostly without containers (bring your own, or buy it from them), and we decided to try it, easily since I’ve been saving up the glass containers from Nutella and the jams, and we had two clean ones at home for this.

This needs a bit more context: both me and my wife love spicy food in general, and in particular love mixing up a lot of different spices when making sauces or marinades, which means we have a fairly well stocked spice cupboard. And since we consume a lot of them, we have been restocking them with bags of spices rather than with new bottles (which is why we started cleaning and setting aside the glass jars), so the idea of finding a place where you can fill your own jar was fairly appealing to me. And while we did expect a bit of a price premium given the location (we were in Chiswick after all), it was worth a try.

Another caveat on all of this: the quality, choice and taste of ingredients are not obvious. They are, by definition, up to personal taste. Which means that doing a direct price-by-price comparison is not always possible. But at the same time, we do tend to like the quality of spices we find, so I think we’ve been fair when we boggled at the prices, and in particular at the prices fluctuation between different ingredients. So I ended up making a quick comparison table, based off the prices on their website, and the websites of Morrisons and Waitrose (because, let’s be honest, that’s probably the closest price comparison you want to make, as both options are clearly middle-to-upper class).

Price comparison between Source, Morrisons, Waitrose and the Schwartz brand spices. More accessible on Google Drive.
I’ve taken the cheapest priced option for all the searches, looking for bigger sizes.

If you look at the prices, you can see that, compared with the bottled spices, they are actually fairly competitive! I mean cumin costs over four times if you buy it in bottle at Waitrose, so getting it cheaper is definitely a steal… until you notice that Morrisons stocks a brand (Rajah) that is half the price. Indeed, Rajah appears to sell spices in big bags (100g or 400g), and at a significantly lower price than most of the other options. In personal taste, we love them.

A few exceptions do come to mind: sumac is not easy to find, and it’s actually cheaper at Source. Cayenne pepper is (unsurprisingly) cheaper than Waitrose, and not stocked at Morrisons at all, so we’ll probably pop by again to fill in a large jar of it. Coarse salt is cheaper, and even cheaper than the one I bought on Amazon, but I bought 3Kg two years ago and we still have one unopened bag.

The one part of the pictures that the prices don’t tell, of course, is the quality and the taste. I’ll be very honest and say that I personally dislike the Waitrose extra virgin olive oil I chose the price of (although it’s a decent oil); the Morrisons one is not the cheapest, but that one tasted nasty when I tried it, so I went for the one we actually usually buy. Since we ran out of oil at home, and we needed to buy some anyway, we are now using Source’s and, well, I do like it actually better than Morrisons, so we’ll probably stick to buying it, despite it being more expensive — it’s still within the realm of reasonable prices for good extra virgin olive oil. And they sell it in a refillable bottle, so next time we’ll use that one again.

Another thing that is very clear from the prices is just how much the “organic” label appears to weigh in on the cost of food. I don’t think it’s reasonable to pay four times the price for sunflower oil — and while it is true that I’m comparing the prices of a huge family bottle with that of a fill-your-own-bottle shop, which means you can get less of it at a time, and you pay for that convenience, it’s also one of the more easily stored groceries, so I think it’s fair enough.

And by the way, if you followed my twitter rant, I have good news. Also in Chiswick there’s a Borough Kitchen store, old good brick-and-mortar, and they had a 1L bottle for an acceptable £5.

So where does this whole rant get us? I think that the environment needs for activists to push for affordable efforts. It’s not useful if the zero-waste options are only available to the top 5%. I have a feeling that indeed for some of the better, environmentally aware options we’ll have to pay more. But that should not mean paying £5 for a litre of sunflower oil! We should make sure we can feed the people in the world, if you think that the world is worth saving, and do so in a reasonable way.

Before closing let me just point out the obvious: Source appears to have their heart in the right place with this effort. Having had my own business, I’m sure that the prices reflect the realities of renting a space just off Chiswick High Road, paying for the staff, the required services, the suppliers, and the hidden cost of families with children entering the store and letting their kids nibble on the candies and nuts straight out of the boxes (I’ve seen at least one while we were inside!), without paying or buying anything else.

What I fear we really need is this type of services to scale to the level of big high street grocery stores. Maybe with trade-in containers in place of bring-your-own for deliveries (which I would argue can be more environmentally-friendly than people having to take a car to go grocery shopping). But that’s something I can only hope for.

Working in a bubble, contributing outside of it

The holiday season is usually a great time for personal projects, particularly for people like me who don’t go back “home” with “the family” — quotes needed, since for me home is where I am (London) and where my family is (me and my wife.) Work tends to be more relaxed – even with the added pressure of completing the OKRs for the quarter, and to define those for the next – and given that there is no public transport going on, the time saved in commuting also adds up to an ideal time to work on hobbies.

Unfortunately, this year I’m feeling pretty useless on this front, and I thought this uselessness feeling is at least something I can talk about for the dozen-or-so remaining readers of this blog, in an era of social media and YouTube videos. If this sounds very dismissive, it’s probably because that is the feeling of irrelevancy that took over me, and something that I should probably aim to overcome in 2020, one way or another.

If you are reading this post, it’s likely that you noticed my FLOSS contributions waning and pretty much disappearing over the past few years, except for my work around glucometerutils, and the usbmon-tools package (that kind-of derives off it.) I have contributed the odd patch to the Linux kernel, and more recently to some of the Python typing tooling, but those are really drive-by contributions as I found time for.

Given some of the more recent Twitter threads on Google’s policies around open source contributions, you may wonder if it is related to that, and the answer is “not really”. Early on, I was granted an IARC approval for me to keep working on unpaper (which turned out possibly overkill), for the aforementioned glucometerutils, and for some code I wrote while reverse engineering my gaming mouse. More recently, I’ve leveraged the simplified patching policy, and granted approval for releasing both usbmon-tools and tanuga (although the latter is only released as a skeleton right now.)

So I have all the options, and all the opportunities, to contribute FLOSS projects while in employment of a big multinational Internet company. Why don’t I do that more, then? I think the answer is that I work in a bubble for most of the day, and when I try to contribute something on my spare time, I find myself missing the support structure that the bubble gives me.

I want to make clear here that I’m not saying that everything is better in the bubble. Just that the bubble is soft and warm enough that makes the world outside of it scary, sometimes annoying, but definitely more vast. And despite a number of sensible tools being available out there (and in many cases, better tools), it takes a significant investment in researching the right way to do something, to the point that I suffer from CBA syndrome.

The basic concepts are not generally new: people have talked out loud at conferences about the monorepo, my friend Dinah McNutt spoke and wrote at length about Rapid, the release system we use internally, and that drives the automatic releases, and so on. If you’re even more interested in the topic, this March the book Software Engineering at Google will be released by O’Reilly. I have not read it myself, but I have interacted on and off with two of the curators and I’m sure it’s going to be worth its weight in gold.

Some of the tools are also being released, even if sometimes in modified ways. But even when they are, the amount of integration you may have internally is lost when trying to use them outside. I have considered using Bazel for glucometerutils in the past — but in addition to be a fairly heavy dependency, there’s no easy way to reference most of the libraries that glucometerutils need. At the end of the day, it was not worth trying to use it, despite making my life easier by reducing the cognitive load of working on opensource projects in my personal time.

Possibly the main “support beam” of the bubble, though, is the opinionated platform, which can be seen from the outside in form of the style guides but extends further. To keep the examples related to glucometerutils, while the tests do use absl‘s parameterized class, they are written in a completely different style than I would do at work, and they feel wrong when it comes to importing the local copy of the module to test it. When I looked around to figure out what’s the best practice to write tests in Python, I could find literally dozens of blog posts, StackOverflow answers, documentation for testing frameworks, that all gave slightly different answers. In the bubble you have (pretty much) one way to write the basic test — and while people can be creative even within those guidelines, creativity is usually frown upon.

The same is true for release engineering. As I noted and linked above, all of the release grunt work is done by the Rapid tool in the bubble — and for the most part it’s automated. While there’s definitely more than one way to configure the tool, at least you know which tool to use. And while different teams have often differing opinions on those configurations, you can at least find the opinion of your team, or the closest team to you with an Opinion (with the capital O) and follow that — it might not be perfect for your use, but if it’s allowed it usually means it was reviewed and vouched for (or copy-pasted from something else that was.)

An inside joke from the Google bubble is that the documentation is always out of date and never to be trusted. Beside the unfairness of the joke to the great tech writers I had pleasure to work with, who are more than happy to make sure the documentation is not out of date (but need to know that’s the case, and most of them don’t find out until it’s too late), the truth is that at least we do have documentation for most processes and tools. The outside world has tons of documentation, and some of it is out of date, and it’s very hard to tell whether it’s still correct and valid.

Trying to figure out how to configure a CI/CD tool for a Python project on GitHub (or worse, trying to figure out how to make it release valid packages on PyPI!) still feels like going by the early 2000s HOWTOs, where you hope that the three years old description of the XFree86 configuration file is still matching the implementation (hint: it never did.) Lots of the tools are not easy to integrate, and opting into them takes energy (and sometimes money) — the end result of which is that despite me releasing usbmon-tools nearly a year ago, you still need an unreleased dependency, as the fix I needed for it is not present in any released version, and I haven’t dared bothering the author to ask for a new release yet.

It’s very possible that if I was not working in a bubble all of these issues wouldn’t be be big unknowns — probably if I spend a couple of weeks reviewing the various options for CI/CD I can come up with a good answer for setting up automated releases, and then I can go to the dependency’s author and say “Hey, can I set this up for you?” and that would solve my problem. But that is time I don’t really have, when we’re talking about hobby projects. So I end up opening up the editor in the Git repository I want to work on, add a dozen line or so of code to something I want to do, and figure out that I’m missing the tool, library, interface, opinion, document, procedure that I need, feel drained, and close the editor without having committed – let alone pushed – anything.

Stop slagging off IoT users if you care about them

It’s the season for gifts (or, as some would say, consumerism), and as way too often is the case, it starts a holy war between those who enjoy gadgets, new technology, and Internet-connected appliances, and those who define themselves as security conscious and tell people that they wouldn’t connect a computer to the Internet if they didn’t have to.

Those who follow me on Twitter, probably already know which side of this divide I find myself in: I do have a few IoT devices at home, and I’m “IoT-positive”. I even got into a long Twitter discussion years ago about the fact that IoT is no longer just a random marketing buzzword, but got to actually refer to a class of devices that the public at large can identify, the same way as “white goods” would, in the British Isles.

I have a very hard time giggling Twitter posts from geek supremacists making fun of Internet-connected ovens, when the very same geeks insist they would never possibly buy something like that — despite the excited reactions of the Linux, BSD and FLOSS communities nearly fifteen years ago at the release of a NetBSD-operated toaster.

This does not mean that I’m okay with all the random stuff that’s being proposed as an Internet-enable device. I have looked briefly at Bluetooth toothbrushes and I’m still lost on what the value proposition is with them. And even last year when I got a smart plug it took me a lot of thoughts to figure out what it would be used for, and decided that, for 11 months of the years, the plug will stay in a box, and it will come out at the same time as the Christmas Tree.

Today’s musing is finding a “Smart Essential Oil Diffuser” which was funny because I was looking for something completely different (a kitchen oil bottle, it’s a long story), but I actually clicked on it out of curiosity. I have looked into this type of devices last year, while I was writing my post about smart plugs: they sounded like an interesting approach to make sure they are on for a few minutes before we arrive home, just to give a good smell to the flat without having to keep a more standard Ambipur on all the time.

Indeed, I have considered converting our Muji diffuser into a “Smart” one with an Adafruit Featherwing, but it works too good to open it up right now, and nearly everything I can see in stores like TkMaxx appears to be fairly low quality and with power supplies that look too low to be true. But the device I found over there also appears to be a fairly bad one, so I think our old-school Muji diffuser will stay around instead.

The thing is, whether you like it or not, the public at large, not just the geeks, are the driving force of manufacturers. And you won’t win anyone over by being smug and pointing at how good you are at not buying stuff that is Internet-enabled, because you don’t trust it. The public will. So instead of throwing all IoT options under a bus, and making fun of their users, I prefer Matthew’s approach of actually looking into the various lightbulbs and documenting which ones are, indeed, terrible.

Indeed, if you think that Internet-enabled aroma diffusers are pointless, useless, and nobody will want to have one… you’ll find out that someone will be making one, people will buy one, and most likely some random Chinese factory will start making a generic enough model that other companies can rebrand, and provide the least secure option out there.

I think this is also a valid metaphor for politics nowadays. It doesn’t matter that you are sure you have the right answer — if you demonize the public at large telling them they are stupid, or that they are at fault for things, you’re not likely going take your advice for long.

So if you care about the people around you, instead of telling them that IoT is terrible and you shouldn’t connect anything to a computer ever in a million years, try finding what is not terrible, while still providing them with the convenience they desire. Whether it is a smart lightbulb, a smart thermostat, or an app-enabled doorbell. And if you can’t find anything, and you still think you’re smarter than others, make it. Clearly there’s desire for those tools, can you make a secure and safe one?

Curve is giving “free” money away, again.

About a year and a half ago, I reviewed the Curve debit card, and I went back talking about it when talking about foreign transaction fees. If you don’t want to go back and read the whole set of text, I’ll give a very brief description: Curve is a proxy-card, that allows you to connect a bunch of other debit and credit cards, and to decide when you pay (or, critically, shortly after) which card you want to charge your expense to. It includes a few features such as some amount of free (or cheaper) transaction fee spend, but the “proxy” nature of the card is the selling (or not-really-selling as I’ll explain later) point.

In my previous posts, I have made two main points about Curve: the first is that they give away for free most of the useful features of the service, and the other that they make no real sense in the UK, as one of the possibly biggest selling points (the foreign transaction free nullification) is vastly irrelevant: most high street banks have some offering with no foreign transaction fee, and I still venture that Santander is the best UK offering for globetrotters who need to use their card in many different currencies. Despite my fairy pessimistic view of Curve’s business plans, it seems like the management is taking a different view — even FT Alphaville wrote about their marketing campaign.

Speaking of pessimistic view — I am a bit skeptical about their marketing of “100 Cards in One”. While it would be a great feature a few years ago, in 2019 most of my spending goes through my phone, with Google Pay. While I have half a dozen separate cards, most of them are compatible with Google Pay, so I don’t carry them with me. The ironic exception being my company card. As it turns out, this is something that Curve can help with: it now supports Google Pay, and on a business trip I can proxy my expenses to the company card.

Now, one claim on their website that appears to mostly hold true is «Your gateway to money for nothing.» Because they do appear to run lots of promotions that give you free money. Indeed, in the past week I received two email from Curve: one to announce that they would give me £5 if I just used my card at all (which I did, just to see if they pay up), and another to tell me that they are giving a “Christmas gift” for all their users to select three new retailers to get their 1% cashback from. All of this for a “Curve Blue”, which is their totally free tier.

Speaking of the 1% cashback, when I signed up last year, Amazon was not one of the options, or I would have taken it. It was this time, so I did that, under the impression that one way or another I do end up buying stuff off them often enough, and in the next three months I may get some value out of it. Despite this, their paid offer is still pointless: they charge you £9.99 a month, and to cover that on cashback alone you would have to spend £1000 a month from those three retailers. And no, I don’t think the Travel/Gadget insurances that they peddle with the offer mean anything else — there’s a doubling of how much free cash you can get from ATMs, but they appear to have closed the loophole that allowed you to withdraw cash and get loyalty points, or cashback, from a credit card, without incurring in cash handling fees.

So yeah, it looks like they do give money for nothing. Well, for some profiling data I guess. The obvious question is where that money comes from, given that the free offering is just compelling enough, and their paid offering are… in one word, overpriced. As I said in the previous post on foreign transaction fees, Santander offers their All in One Credit Card for £3 a month, and is also 0% foreign transaction fees and comes with a 0.5% cashback on all purchases; recovering that monthly fee requires “only” £600/month spend across any vendor (and not just three), and if you spend more you can probably pay for the travel/gadget insurance separately. And since it’s issued as a World MasterCard (rather than a Debit MasterCard), it also allows you to use some of the available perks worldwide, including some airports’ priority lane at security (as it turns out, that includes Venice Airport, which is very handy since that’s where we fly in and out for to see my family.)

And if you want to compare with the Curve Metal offering at £14.99 a month, well, Santander offers a World Elite Mastercard at the same price point, which comes with the same 0.5% cashback (although capped to nullify the monthly fee.) Despite not coming with the insurances (which again I don’t find particularly compelling, it does have a discount for Santander’s own offering. And it provides LoungeKey access just as well, except that you don’t have to pay the £20 per person entry fee. Being a World Elite card, it also comes with a bunch of other perks, including a Boingo subscription (not particularly compelling to me either, but worth noting.)

Anyway, if you are yet to make your Christmas purchases, and are interested in getting some more extra cashback with Curve, you can download the app from their website and if you want you can sign up with the code BG2G3 to get another £5 out of the magic free money card (and give me the same.)

Revolut, as of October 2019

A few months ago I wrote a not-so-short comparison of a few FinTech services with offerings from high street banks in the UK — and I would note again, that the comparison does not hold up in Ireland, so it’s definitely biased, but I would uphold it for good reason. I think it might be time to do a bit more dusting over it.

The first service I should get back to talk about is Revolut, which I first praised and more recently complained about. As I said in a number of previous posts, my reasons to keep using Revolut for day-to-day transactions have pretty much disappeared: my Santander credit card gives me 0.5% cashback on all transactions, and no foreign transaction fee, why would I use Revolut? Virtual cards, and rotating-number cards are interesting and have their use, but honestly, I can’t be bothered unless it’s for very shady operations where I don’t trust giving my credit card, but those are pretty much corner cases.

Revolut has been running multiple advertising campaign throughout the London Tube, the most recent one promising three Tube trips free if you pay with Revolut. I could probably do that, next week, maybe, if I paid enough attention — I don’t use monthly tickets, so I can change card any Monday as long as I use it until the same until Sunday to cover the 7-day cap. But I had bad history with using Revolut on the TfL network before, although admittedly that was when I was landing from Dublin, and the location-based security tripped.

Update 2019-10-07: turns out I cannot actually use their TfL offer because it relies on Google Pay (which with Revolut I found already too unreliable to use for commuting) and only works if you have a Visa-issued card. My card is MasterCard-issued still.

If you check the news, the FT reported just this week how Revolut expects to reach “viability” despite continuing to lose money. This is likely because, as I pointed in my complain-post, Revolut makes perfect sense as long as you’re not paying anything for it. The only reason to sign up for any Premium or Metal tier in London (where most of their advertising budget appears to be spent, from what I read from news) is if you don’t understand the services available from the high street, or if you want to subsidize the free tier for everyone else. Funnily enough, FT Alphaville reported on the same day of the staff cashing it in.

I had to use Revolut only once in the past few months, and that was a couple of days ago. My sister asked me if I could send her some money for her to use the card, as her debit cards expired and she was trying to buy something — remember Italy does not have “faster payments” so inter-bank transfers are not instantaneous. It should be a simple operation: top-up £50, send £50 to my sister, she can convert to € and spend it.

Topping up worked like a charm. But sending the money didn’t: in addition to confirming my fingerprint, the app said it would send me an email, and to check the email from the same device to confirm the operation. The email can be re-sent only after one minute, but (as often) it recommends you to check your Junk or Spam folder too. The email never arrived. I don’t mean within a minute. I mean that this is two days later, the email has still not arrived yet.

No the mail server was not having a hiccup. Yes I did try resending it five minutes later. Yes I did check the Spam folder. No it’s not graylisting. My email address is served by G Suite, which means it’s more reliable than a normal Gmail address. Revolut can’t seem to be able to send email to Gmail. And it’s not just me. The same problem with email not arriving happened a number of months ago to my girlfriend, while sending money to my Revolut account! Anyway the answer is that I now have £50 that I can’t seem to be able to send to my sister, she ended up asking our mum for the transfer instead, and I have even less trust in the service.

I complained on Twitter about this, but without tagging in the Revolut account. When this happened to my girlfriend, and I ranted at them about it, they kept insisting to “check [my] spam folder”, which of course we did. If I asked now, I’m expecting to hear that “PSD2 made them do it”.

It’s sad, but I can’t really expect much better from a service that, despite a lot of nice ideas at the start, appear to have found a business model only to augment banks in places where high street has no offering (Ireland), or for people who can’t seem to know better (the whole Bitcoin/cryptocurrency part, that appears to be the sole attraction for Premium/Metal for quite a few people).

Glucometer Review: beurer GL50 evo

I was looking for a new puzzle to solve after I finally finished with the GlucoRx Nexus (aka TaiDoc TD-4277), so I decided to check out what Boots, being one of the biggest pharmacy in the country, would show on their website under “glucometer”. The answer was the Beurer GL-50, which surprised me because I didn’t know Beurer did glucometers at all. It also was extremely overpriced at £55. But thankfully I found it for £20 at Argos/eBay, so I decided to give it a try.

The reason why I was happy to get one was that the the device itself looked interesting, and reminded me of the Accu-Chek Mobile, with its all-in-one design. While the website calls it a 3-in-1, there are only two components to the device: the meter itself and the lancing device. The “third” device is the USB connector that appears when you disconnect the other two. I have to say that this is a very interesting approach, as it makes it much easier to connect to a computer — if it wasn’t that the size of the meter makes it very hard to connect it.

On my laptop, I can only use it on the USB plug on the right, because on the left, it would cover the USB-C plug I use to charge it. It’s also fairly tall, which makes it hard to use on chargers such as my trusted Anker 5-port USB-C (of which I have five, spread across rooms.) At the end, I had to remove two cables from one of them to be able to charge the meter, which is required for it to be usable at all, when it arrives.

To be honest, I’m not sure if the battery being discharged was normal or due to the fact that the device appears to have been left on shelves for a while: the five sample strips to test the device expire in less than two months. I guess it’s not the kind of device that flies off the shelves.

FreeStyle Libre, gl50 evo, GlucoRx Nexus

So how does the device fare compared to other meters? Size wise, it’s much nicer to handle than the GlucoRx, although it looks bigger than the FreeStyle Libre reader. Part of the reason is that the device, in its default configuration, includes the lancing device, unlike both of the meters I’m comparing it with above. If you don’t plan to use the included lancing device, for instance because you have a favourite lancing device like me (I’m partial to the OneTouch Delica), you can remove the lancing device and hide the USB plug with the alternative provider cap. The meter then takes a much smaller profile than the Libre too. I actually like the compact size better than the spread out one of the FreeStyle Precision Neo.

FreeStyle Libre, gl50 evo (without lancing device), GlucoRx Nexus

Interface-wise, the gl50 is confusingly different from anything I have seen before. It comes with a flush on/off switch on the side, which would be frustrating for most people with short nails, or for people with impeded motion control. Practically, I think this and the “Nexus” are at opposite ends of the scale — the TD-4277 has big, blocky display that can be read without glasses and a single, big button, which makes it a perfect meter for the elderly. The gl50 is frustrating even for me in my thirties.

The flush switch is not the only problem. After you turn it on, the control you have is a wheel, which can be clicked. So you navigate menus in up-down-click. Not very obvious but feasible. But since the wheel can easily be pressed in your purse, that’s why you got the flush switch, I guess. The UI is pretty much barebone but it includes the settings for enabling Bluetooth (with a matching Android app, which I have not checked out for this review yet), and NFC (not sure what for). Worthy of note is that the UI defaults to German, without asking you, and you need to manage to get to the settings in that language to switch to English, Italian, French, or Spanish.

Once you plug it into a computer with Windows, the device appears as a standard CD-Rom UMS device that includes an auto-started “portable” version of the download software, which is a very nice addition, again reminiscent of the Accu-Chek Mobile. It also comes with an installer for the onboard software. As a preview of the technical information post on this meter, it looks like that, similar to the OneTouch Verio, the readings are downloaded through UMS/SCSI packets.

I called out Windows above because I have not checked how this even presents on macOS, and on Linux… it doesn’t. It looks like I may have to take some time to debug the kernel, because what I get on Linux is infinite dmesg spam. I fear the UMS implementation on the meter is missing something, and Linux sends a command that the meter does not recognize.

The software itself is pretty much bland, and there’s nothing really much to say. It does not appear to have a way to even set or get the time for the device, which in my case is still stuck in 2015, because I couldn’t bother yet to roll the wheel all the way to today.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this meter over any of the other meters I have or used. If beurer keeps staying in the market of glucometers (assuming they are making it themselves, rather than rebranding someone else’s, like GlucoRx and Menarini appear to do), then it might be an interesting start of further competition in Europe, which I would actually appreciate.

Glucometer notes: GlucoRx Nexus

This is a bit of a strange post, because it would be a glucometer review, except that I bought this glucometer a year and a half ago, teased a review, but don’t actually remember if I ever wrote any notes for it. While I may be able to get a new feel for the device to write a review, I don’t even know if the meter is still being distributed, and a few of the things I’m going to write here suggest me that it might not be the case, but who knows.

I found the Nexus as an over-the-counter boxed meter at my local pharmacy, in London. To me it appears like the device was explicitly designed to be used by the elderly, not just because of the large screen and numbers, but also because it comes with a fairly big lever to drop out the test strip, something I had previously only seen in the Sannuo meter.

This is also the first meter I see with an always-on display — although it seems that the backlight turns on only when the device is woken up, and otherwise is pretty much unreadable. I guess they can afford this type of display given that the meter is powered by 2 AAA batteries, rather than CR2032 like others.

As you may have guessed by now from the top link about the teased review, this is the device that uses a Silicon Labs CP2110 HID-to-UART adapter, for which I ended up writing a pyserial driver, earlier this year. The software to download the data seems to be available from the GlucoRx website for Windows and Mac — confusingly, the website you actually download the file from is not GlucoRx’s but Taidoc’s. TaiDoc Technology Corporation being named on the label under the device, together with MedNet GmbH. A quick look around suggests TaiDoc is a Taiwanese company, and now I’m wondering if I’m missing a cultural significance around the test strips, or blood, and the push-out lever.

I want to spend a couple notes about the Windows software, which is the main reason why I don’t know if the device is still being distributed. The download I was provided today was for version 5.04.20181206 – which presumes the software was still being developed as of December last year – but it does not seem to be quite tested to work on Windows 10.

The first problem is that that the Windows Defender malware detection tool actually considers the installer itself as malware. I’m not sure why, and honestly I don’t care: I’m only using this on a 90-days expiring Windows 10 virtual machine that barely has access to the network. The other problem, is that when you try to run the setup script (yes, it’s a script, it even opens a command prompt), it tries to install the redistributable for .NET 3.5 and Crystal Reports, fail and error out. If you try to run the setup for the software itself explicitly, you’re told you need to install .NET 3.5, which is fair, but then it opens a link from Microsoft’s website that is now not found and giving you a 404. Oops.

Setting aside these two annoying, but not insurmountable problems, what remains is to figure out the protocol behind the scenes. I wrote a tool that reads a pcapng file and outputs the “chatter”, and you can find it in the usbmon-tools repository. It’s far from perfect and among other things it still does not dissect the actual CP2110 protocol — only the obvious packets that I know include data traffic to the device itself.

This is enough to figure out that the serial protocol is one of the “simplest” that I have seen. Not in the sense of being easy to reverse, but rather in term of complexity of the messages: it’s a ping-pong protocol with fixed-length 8-bytes messages, of which the last one is a simple checksum (sum-modulo-8-bit), a fixed start byte of 0x51, and a fixed end with a bit for host-to-device and device-to-host selection. Adding to the first nibble of the message to always have the same value (2), it brings down the amount of data to be passed for each message to 34-bit. Which is a pretty low amount of information even when looking at simple information as glucose readings.

At any rate, I think I already have a bit of the protocol figured out. I’ll probably finish it over the next few days and the weekend, and then I’ll post the protocol in the usual repository. Hopefully if there are other users of this device they can be well served by someone writing a tool to download the data that is not as painful to set up as the original software.

Fishy Facebook Ads: Earthly Citizens, Shutter & Contrast, and many more

(If you prefer this in form of a Twitter thread, see this one.)

Let’s start with the usual disclaimer that despite me working for a company that sells advertisement, this post is my own personal opinion, not my employer’s. I have written about Internet ads for years, well before I joined the company, and so it’s nothing new. To the usual disclaimer I’m going to add a few words to point out that there will be a few company names used in this post — I’ll be very clear when I think they are involved in something fishy, and when I think they are not involved at all.

This all starts with me deciding to get myself a new camera. While I’m very happy about the photos that my usual camera produce, I wanted something lighter that I could go around town more often with. But I also have been having issues with my shoulder, and I’ve been looking out for a good “handy” backpack to keep my stuff in. This is all relevant information.

Indeed, if you follow me on Twitter you may have seen me asking around for suggestions on backpacks. And this is also relevant: since I’m actually not minding ads for relevant content for myself, I have not hidden my looking for a new bag, I spoke about it on social media, and I have searched for backpacks and bags on my normal Google session. This is, again, all relevant information.

Because of my Google searches, I have been seeing a lot of ads related to photography. Including the one for the chain of photography stores that convinced me to go and grab my new camera from them. Very few of those ads are useful to me, but that one in particular have been.

Then the other day, on Instagram, I saw the ads for a backpack from a never-heard-before company advertising as Earthly Citizens. I’m not going to link directly to their website, although I’m choosing to explicitly name them here so that people who may be looking for them on Google and other search engines have a landing page helping them. The backpack that they advertised is this one (archived link) and it actually looks very nice in theory, on offer at £87.75 compared to a RRP of £159.61. To compare, my trusty Think Tank Airport Essentials is £147.04, and that’s one hell of a good bag.

The amount of red flags on that advertisement was high: unknown brand, no branding on the actual bag, unrealistic “flash sale” with no dates on it, and so on. So I didn’t really pay much attention. Then of course, since I have looked at the ad, I started seeing the same bag on Facebook — together with nearly 900 positive comments. I decided to do a minimum amount of digging into it, and found out that the website that the ad points to is a standard Shopify instance, which means that digging into it with IP addresses or WhoIs information is useless. And since there’s no address provided for the company even on privacy pages, there’s not much to go by. I walked away.

A day later, another set of ads start appearing on my Facebook stream, and they are for a backpack that is stunningly similar, or rather identical. But from a different page that has a more “photography” feel to it, called “Shutter & Contrast”. And that piqued my interest a little bit, because it sounded like another one of those cloned bags that I have seen aplenty on Instagram, and I would actually like to find the source at that point.

Just like Earthly Citizens, Shutter & Contrast don’t seem to be very well reviewed. Searching the web for the name and combination of reviews, backpack and scam don’t bring up anything useful. They also have a Shopify site, although their page for the same backpack (archived, again) is a bit more somber and “professional-looking”.

Funnily enough, it looks like they have blocked copy-paste and right-click, so that you can’t quickly reverse-image-search their photos. It didn’t surprise me, as I remembered a BuzzFeed article on fake fashion stores outright stealing real designers’ photos, so stopping the quickest reverse image search option would obviously be high in their intentions. Of course it’s actually easy to work this around, with any of the browsers’ developer tools.

Another interesting part from the Shutter & Contrast shop page is that they actually have an address in their Privacy Page: 11923 NE Sumner St, STE 813872, Portland, Oregon, 97220, USA. Again I’m repeating it here for sake of those looking any information on this company, because if you look up the address, you’ll probably find a Yelp page for a closed location called My Trail Gear, although it has a different “STE” number. The reviews, calling this a scam and pointing out that there is at least two more companies using the address, called “Bear and Tees” and “Shark and Tees”.

Checking the address on StreetView shows a smallish warehouse. My best guess is that there’s a service at that address that is similar to Ireland’s Parcel Motel and Parcel Wizard: companies that allow you to receive and send goods from that address, and then forward it somewhere else. The different “STE” numbers are used to route the parcels to the right customer. This means that despite the bad reviews on Yelp, Shutter & Contrast might be legit.

So I decided to take a closer look at the first one again. Earthly Citizen has a fairly active Facebook page, and if you read their About section, it says:

Our goal is to source all the best travel related documents from all around the world and bring them directly to your doorstep

Earthly Citizens Facebook Page

They don’t seem to be doing anything like that. Instead they seem to mostly re-post Instagram pictures by other people. At least it appears they are crediting the photographers — but it’s clear that they are using someone else’s pictures for their own marketing (so that they get people to follow their account). This should be worrisome enough, but it doesn’t stop there.

If you look at what they sell, they appear to be selling a lot of random stuff that you would find in those trinkets/gadgets shop in big malls, without brands, rhyme, or reason. So it does not look like they are the “source” of that bag to begin with. But is Shutter & Contrast then?

Earthly Citizens say that there are “too many fake websites that steal content”. They would know since they seem to be one.

A very quick reverse image search finds the same exact image appears on AliExpress (not archived because they seem to defeat it), the Chinese shopping website. There are multiple sellers for it there as well, and most of them have the same images — the same images that both Earthly Citizens and Shutter & Contrast used on their website.

It might very well be that these are the bag equivalent of Gongkai, as there are a few stores that sell them, and the fact that they come from Guangdong does not mean they are not good. I have a lovely tripod I bought at the Shanghai Xing Guang Photography Market, it’s a Chinese brand, it’s proper carbon fiber, and I paid for it half the price that you would pay in store in Europe, taxes included. If that is the case, the markups that Earthly Citizens and Shutter & Contrast are applying are thievery: they price it at $110 and $83 respectively, while AliExpress’s most expensive seller has it at $52.

But there is one thing that I forgot about during my Twitter rant, and that my girlfriend pointed out: what about the pictures of people in the advertising? Neither AliExpress nor Earthly Citizens appear to have a picture of the backpack with a person. There are people with cameras, but nobody with the actual backpack that you can reverse image search for. There is a video on Earthly Citizens’s Facebook page, which is the same used by the Instagram ad, and that suggests that the bag physically exist, but it’s heavily watermarked that makes it hard to find the source on. Shutter &Contrast has a video unlisted on YouTube, on a white background with no logos shown, and just re-captioned to fit their marketing of it. It appears uploaded in February 2019.

More useful, Shutter & Contrast appear to also have a still picture of someone wearing what looks like the backpack they are selling, and that’s the first time in this adventure I managed to find that. Reverse image search brings us to yet another Shopify instance under the name ConnectedTechPacks (archived), which can also be found as BestGearPack. Their website is a bit more well made, and it appears to only sell that single backpack. Are they the source? I doubt so, since both websites were registered in April this year, and we know that the backpack existed in February. But they also have a couple of different people with the same backpack, and another angle of the same guy.

Another reverse image search later finds yet another Shopify instance with the same backpack, a set of GIF animations that are also heavily watermarked, but are the same as Earthly Citizens’s version.

So where did all this investigation bring us? Not really anywhere. I can’t find any trustworthy brand selling the backpack, and while I may be willing to risk my £40 on the AliExpress version – rather than twice as much with any of the other Shopify instances that I found – I don’t hold my breath for it to look at all like they show it, or have the build quality that I would trust my cameras with.

It does show just how easy it is to fool people nowadays. It’s easy to set up a “storefront” without needing an actual space anymore. It’s easy to “gain trust” by having people follow your page with no original content, just by re-posting content that professionals provided.

What about the 900 positive comments that the ad received? Well it’s possible that they are actual real satisfied customers who didn’t realize they got charged probably twice as much as they should have for the same bag you can get from AliExpress. Or they may be “bought engagement”. Or just a bunch of bots that have harvested someone else’s name and pictures to create fake profile to sell the stuff.

You know all the panic around politics and elections and fake profiles? It’s not just the elections. Fake profiles sell scams. And that can hurt people just as much as political elections. I remember when it was just the artists complaining about pages re-posting their content… we should have paid attention then. Now the same pages and the same techniques are used for more nefarious purposes and we all pay the price, sooner or later.