512 Pixels

Editor’s Note: This appeared in the Read and Trust newsletter exactly one year ago today.

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By the time you’re reading this essay, it’s been re-written twice.

Most of the time, I don’t re-write pieces. I edit and re-arrange them often, but rarely do I open a new text document and just start over.

Needless to say, it was discouraging. The handful of people who read the earlier versions of this all said the same thing:

What are you trying to say here?

I guess I didn’t get my point across in the previous versions. Maybe I didn’t have a point. Who knows. But all of this got me thinking about the topic at hand this month — resolutions.

I’m not sure why I picked this month to write an edition of the newsletter. I usually don’t make New Year’s Resolutions.

The last one I made was in 2009, actually. It was to work out more often. I joined a gym with my brother, and three days a week, we worked out together in the evenings. It was great. I got to spend time with hanging out with him, and I could notice the effects of working out after just a few weeks. I had no complaints about it, besides a sore muscle here and there. It was — by far — the most successful resolution I’ve had.

(I use the term “muscle” loosely, okay?)

It lasted five months, then life threw me and my family a tumor-sized curveball, and I had to sit it aside.

To be perfectly honest, I haven’t been to the gym since.

So, why share a story about how I haven’t had success with resolutions, and given up on them completely?

Because now, here at the end of January, you’re right on the edge of failing. Experts claim that it takes at least 21 days to form a habit. Check the calendar, bro.

Now, I’m not going to sit here behind my MacBook Pro’s keyboard and preach to you about how vital this (and the coming) weeks are in making your resolution a habit. I simply can’t do that.

What I can do is talk about what happens if you fail to make the transition.

Failure can be caused by all sorts of things. For me, it was a large, external force than (quite frankly) derailed my entire life. For you, it might be caused by something much simpler, like a trip out of town for work, or a new budgetary restriction that makes Activity X too expensive to keep doing. This list can go on and on, really.

Now, I didn’t have the luxury to examine my failure. Again, hopefully, you do. And that’s really my point with this. If you fail to keep your resolution, take the opportunity to examine it.

Not to get all Merlin Mann on your ass, but if you don’t examine failure, you can’t learn from it.

So, in reflecting ask yourself some questions:

• Was the reason I failed within my control?
• Did I respond to the reason correctly?
• Could I have put safety-nets in place to keep me from failing?

If you fail this year, you might not get totally ripped at the gym, but don’t make that an excuse for not learning something.

President Obama:

That is our generation’s task — to make these words, these rights, these values — of Life, and Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — real for every American. Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life; it does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way, or follow the same precise path to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries—long debates about the role of government for all time — but it does require us to act in our time.

For now decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate. We must act, we must act knowing that our work will be imperfect. We must act, knowing that today’s victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall.

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The BBC:

Security researchers say they have discovered a huge botnet running on the smartphones of more than a million unsuspecting mobile users in China.

The devices had been infected by a Trojan-based attack first discovered in 2011, news agency Xinhua reported.

The botnet can allow the smartphones to be hijacked remotely and potentially used for fraudulent purposes.

Guess what mobile OS it runs on.

I made it two months and one day without an iPhone.

For those keeping score, that’s ten months shy of my original goal.

In that original post, I wrote:

I — like most people I observe in waiting rooms and in line at Starbucks — kill little bits of time with my head down, the glow of my smartphone lighting up my face. Twitter, App.net, Google Reader, Instagram, Email, iMessage, Tumblr and more wedge their way in to my life in little two-minute increments throughout the day.

Being without a smartphone is weird. I started noticing (and getting angry with) people who ignore each other to attend to something on their phones.

I found it easier to connect to people in person — be it over coffee or in meetings — without my iPhone serving as a distraction.

Most of the time, I enjoyed not being as connected as I once was.

So, what happened?

The iPad mini is a great device, and while it got me by for work, it was increasingly frustrating to have to rely on it to get my job done. I spend more and more time between offices, and having to bring my tablet with me was becoming problematic.

Not having an iPhone was also stressful at home. I missed what would have been fun photos or videos of the kids because my Canon was in my bag in the car, and got lost while out of town without Internet-connected maps. Not having iMessage in my pocket made keeping up with friends and family more difficult.

While I failed at keeping my word on the length of my experiment, that doesn’t mean my experiment itself was a failure. Moving forward, I’ll be leaving my iPhone in my pocket much more, relying on it more as a tool, and less of a reason to ignore those around me.

Yes, you read that headline correctly. This might be the coolest Hackintosh ever.

Dean Starkman:

So, all in all, it’s more than instructive to check in on longform newspaper writing, and the start of a new year isn’t a bad time to do it.

And it’s pretty to shocking to see what’s become of the time-honored form since the newspaper industry’s great unraveling started a decade ago.

Want to go paperless in 2013? Check out my guide over on Tools & Toys to get the ball rolling.

Eric Mack:

Just to be clear on what I’m saying, my best educated guesses are that we will see a new iPhone this summer, and it will be an iPhone 5S with mostly iterative updates, a choice of colors, and perhaps the lower-cost model of the latest rumors. But the real question is: then what?

My gut tells me the iPhone as we know it will be done at that point. I have a hunch there will never be an iPhone 6, because Apple will be forced to move into a significantly different form factor to keep people interested and compete with the movement toward bigger phablet-like thingies and emerging wearable electronics (lots of us have fat thumbs, after all). Or, there will be an iPhone 6 and it will disappoint.

Sounds like CBS told CNET to censor common sense.

Too soon?

The Daily Show’s John Oliver discovers that pretend news is the media world’s sole remaining home for intrepid investigative journalists.

In other news, I’m weeping under my desk, clutching my diploma.

via @danfrakes

This week, Myke and I show off our completed Lego projects, and talk about my phone, CNET and censorship.

This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the secret behind exceptional websites. Go to squarespace.com/70decibels to start your free trial and use the offer code 70decibels1 at checkout to get 10% off your first order.

Ten year ago, the space shuttle Columbia launched for the last time.

The mission — STS–107 — was the 113th flown.

Everything was normal until re-entry, but the disaster was a result of an incident at take-off. A briefcase-sized piece of foam came off the external tank, striking Columbia on the leading edge of the left wing.

Such foam strikes were considered normal. In fact, on STS–112, a 4”x5”x12” section of foam came off the external tank and struck Atlantis’ left solid rocket booster, leaving a 3“ deep dent just shy of 4” wide.

Turns out, the foam that struck Columbia damaged its thermal protection system, which was made up of a grid of tiles designed to stand up to the heat generated on the shuttle during re-entry.

The strike was caught by numerous cameras at launch, and the tapes were reviewed by NASA. However, as the Columbia Accident Investigation Board would find, the agency decided that in a vacuum of reliable information, the mission would continue as planned.

Director of Mission Operations John Harpold was quoted as saying:

You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the TPS (thermal protection system). If it has been damaged it’s probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don’t you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?

Sadly, Harpold was right: the crew died unexpectedly while re-entering the atmosphere.

Hot gas entered the left wing. While traveling at Mach 19.5 at an altitude of 209,800 feet, the shuttle shed its first Thermal Protection System tile.

17 seconds later, the shuttle began to pitch and yaw, and 58 seconds later, Columbia began to break up. At 8:59:32 EST on February 1, Mission Commander Rick D. Husband uttered the last communication received from the shuttle:

Roger, uh, bu – [cut off in mid-word] …

In the following weeks, debris (including human remains) were found from southeast of Dallas, through East Texas and part of Arkansas.