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Showing posts from September, 2020

First thoughts on iOS14 and WatchOS7

As someone who's personal technology choices involve only Apple products, I'm pretty excited when the next major release arrives with new features. This release introduced new features that solved or deferred several major issues...at least for me. First, organizing apps manually is a mess, particularly for seldom used apps and utilities. Second, watch face stagnation. iOS14 Thoughts I have a pile of iPhone apps that I use periodically. Apps like Southwest Airlines, PayPal, AllTrails stay on my phone, but aren't every day, core apps. These are typically filed into drawers and are buried until I need them. When I do need them, my workflow to launch the app involves either a down-swipe to search for the app or random swiping between screens and tapping in drawers until I find exactly where I filed it. This is a suboptimal experience.  I should have taken a screenshot of my home screen before updating the approximation below shows a cluttered mess and multiple screens of par

Multi-Cloud is Dead! Long live Multi-Cloud

If you have a Google account, watch Netflix, and stream music from Spotify then congratulations! You can add MultiCloud into your resume buzzword list.  Headphones plugged into a mobile phone. The thing is, we use multiple cloud services without even thinking about it. Using Spotify as the example: the streaming service itself uses another cloud service for authentication (either Facebook or Apple) along with their own native accounts.  By off-loading authentication services to another provider, Spotify can focus on it's core business (streaming music) and their revenue (selling music subscriptions and advertisements). Spotify also streamlines the experience by having users authenticate with other services they frequently use.  In a corporate environment, we are multi-cloud too. Active Directory services offer hybrid support models for on-premises and Azure hosting. If you use Ping Identity for SSO, and CloudFlare as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) on top of your Content Managemen

My Morning Podcasts

 As part of my previously mentioned morning routine, I take my dog, Luna, for a stroll around the neighborhood. I have a regular 1.7 mile route that takes us about 35 minutes each day. During our walks, I've started listening to podcasts to entertain myself. Here's what I've been listening to:  Official AWS Podcast  : a weekly podcast of AWS announcements of new features released. It's a LOT to get through, and not always the most interesting. (40 min) The Internet Report : a weekly podcast detailing last week's outages on the Internet. (20 min) Wall Street Journal Tech News Briefing : daily podcast noting all the interesting news in technology for the day. (5 min) Screaming in the Cloud : Corey Quinn (of Last Week in AWS newsletter fame) bi-weekly interviews with interesting people doing things in the cloud. I maintain a Twitter list of folks interviewed on this podcast too. (45 min)  Up First from NPR : daily podcast on today's top headlines. (5 min) There is