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Jonas Voss

Jonas Voss

Min første email, næsten

En fortælling om hvordan jeg næsten sendte min første email, i 1996.

3 min read

I 1996 var jeg i Hong Kong. Jeg havde været hjemmefra i 10-11mdrs tid, og kommunikerede hjem til København vha breve, som jeg skrev på stort set hver dag, og sendte omtrent en gang om måneden. Jeg modtog nyheder hjemmefra ved at besøge hovedpostkontoret (General Post Office - GPO) i nogle fastlagte byer langs min vej, som min familie og venner kunne sende post til. Det betød at jeg også fik post hjemmefra cirka en gang om måneden.

I Hong Kong stødte jeg for første gang på en internetcafe og tænkte, at jeg da kunne sende en email til min far, som var den eneste jeg kendte på det tidspunkt, der havde en emailadresse. Vildt fedt, det ville han nok blive begejstret over, tænkte jeg.

Jeg fik en computer på cafeen, en af de ansatte startede noget software (jeg tror det var Netscape Communicator, men kan se den først lige udkom i beta i april 1996, så det er måske lige utroligt nok til at være sandt), og jeg satte mig til rette for at komponere min email.

Jeg beskrev i blomstrende prosa mine eventyr i Oceanien og i Østen. Malende beskrivelser af Australien, Indonesien, Malaysia, Brunei, og Singapore. Om duftene, maden, menneskene, og vejret, som jeg vidste min far gik meget op i, og jeg sad der vel i 45min og skrev lystigt. Da jeg havde fået afsluttet min fortælling indtastede jeg min fars email som modtager, udfyldte emne-feltet, og trykkede send.

Der skete ikke noget, Communicator sagde den forsøgte at kontakte min emailudbyder. Det forsøgte den i et stykke tid, hvorefter den gav op. Hmm, jeg prøvede at trykke 'send' igen. Det samme skete. Jeg kaldte en af de ansatte over til min plads, og spurgte hvorfor den ikke ville sende den omfattende email jeg havde forfattet. "Har du indtastet din email, og din emailudbyders serverdetaljer?" spurgte den ansatte.

Det havde jeg ikke, for jeg havde ingen af delene. Og det var således jeg lærte, at for at sende en email, skal man selv have en emailadresse. Min første email fik jeg først sendt da jeg startede på universitet i september 1997, og senere samme år fik jeg internet hjemme. Desværre kan jeg ikke lige umiddelbart huske hvilken email der rent faktisk var min første, og egentlig er historien om hvad der kunne have været min første email, uden tvivl også bedre.

Jonas Voss

Ja, ved hjælp af https://brid.gy (en detalje jeg glemte i mit tidligere opslag (: ) kan jeg hive kommentarer og reaktioner på mine opslag tilbage på min hjemmeside. Jeg får også en email fra min hjemmeside, når brid.gy finder nye ting den har tilføjet til opslag på min hjemmeside: https://i.imgur.com/h3Z0GBP.png.

Jonas Voss

I enjoyed reading this as well, email has indeed been a very resilient technology for the last 50 years. I've been following https://delta.chat/ for a while, and it's really a clever way to build a service on top of email.

Jonas Voss

Jonas Voss

How to respond to Corona misinformation

2 min read

There's a lot of misinformation about the current SARS-CoV-2 outbreak being shared in the silos of messaging apps. This means it's harder to search for them in an attempt to verify their validity. People who share them aren't doing it to cause harm, quite the opposite, they are sharing them because they believe it will help their friends and loved ones.

Various claims about drinking hot water, gargling with a hot water saline solution, and going into the sun are all things that hasn't proven to do anything in terms of avoiding getting the virus, or alleviating it if you are already infected.

If your friends or family share these things with you on chats or email, please tell them that none of these things are proven to work, and that the consequences of following the advice from these copy/paste jobs vary from mostly harmless (drink hot drinks), to potentially harmful to you or others (if you have a runny nose, then you don't have coronavirus).

There's a few things you can do to respond in a way that can help convince them these statements are not true, and that they should stop sharing them as if they are. One of them is pointing them to one of the many sites that are debunking the claims with supported material and science:

Stay safe, stay home and help stop the rumors and the outbreak from spreading.

Jonas Voss

Flawed American Express card registration process

2 min read

Tried to activate an American Express credit card, via the American Express Android app today. Turned into a field study of assholedesign. I wonder if anyone from their customer service team, or their developers ever tried to follow the sign-up flow themselves.

Issue #1 - Secret rules

The fields the user needs to fill out, has no guidance on what qualifies as a valid input. I put in a username, and a password I deemed safe to use.

The app told me the following:

Error message from AMEX signup on Android App

"User ID must contain at least one number."

Ok. I add a number to my login and that worked. It wasn't clear I had to from the beginning.

Issue #2 - More secret rules

I then type in a password. It's 11 characters long, and includes one number, and one special character. That mix usually works.

The app tells me:

Password not valid, refer to Terms for details

"Password not valid, please refer to Terms for details."

What's wrong with writing the requirements in the error message or, and I know or it sounds a bit crazy, right next to the field you need to fill it into (like the Norman Nielsen Group has told us since 2015). At least they could have included a link to the "Terms" where these sacred details can be found. Anyway, I ended up getting a generated one from KeePass, but I still don't know what they rules are for their password.

Issue #3 - Dark design pattern

For the final example, this is how their marketing box looks like:

Image showing checkbox next to text which is counter to user understanding.

Notice how the promotions opt-in checkbox is next to the text saying:

"Your email address will not be shared with other companies to market their own products and services. You can update your preferences later if you wish."

This gives the impression that by checking the box, you agree to them not giving out your email address to other companies, while checking it opts you in, to receiving email promotions from American Express.

If you are designing a sign-up form for anything, please don't make me guess what I can put into the fields. It's a bad user experience that, with just a modicum of thought and testing, could be turned into a great experience. 

 

Jonas Voss

Consuming Instagram differently

4 min read

I've been looking for a different way of consuming Instagram. Facebook has introduced more and more features in their neverending quest to wrestle users from Snapchat and onto Instagram, and I don't care for those. I like Instagram, the photo sharing part, not so much the TV and Stories part. The other reason is that whole privacy thing, of course. Turns out big social media players weren't quite the stewards of our personal data we were hoping for, and spending less time on actual social media websites seems like a good thing.

Except for some musicians and photographers, I don't follow brands on Instagram. I mainly follow people I know. Family, friends, and tags. Being a camera and photo enthusiast, I enjoy looking at photos taken with a variety of cameras and film, and a lot of people use Instagram to show their analogue makings.

For a while I used an app called Hermit on Android. Hermit is a wrapper that turns mobile web versions of websites into apps. It has ad blocking, and a bunch of other nice features. Using Hermit helped me get rid of ads on Instagram, and their algorithm somehow works differently on there as well. I liked the ordering better, it seemed to be more chronological. Only downside: I had to consume it on my phone. It was good, but not great.

Granary.io and Atom to the rescue

Thankfully, people much smarter than me are creating tools for consuming silo'ed social media in different ways. One such tool is Granary.

To be able to get the feed of your friends, and not the feed of your own damn self, you need to find your sessionid cookie value from Instagram. Do the following:

Edit: There's actually a much easier way to do the below, by using https://instagram-atom.appspot.com/ - thanks to Ryan for pointing it out.

  • Open the Chrome Browser
  • go to instagram.com and login with your account
  • after logging in, open the developer console of your browser, and reload the page
  • find the "Application" tab and click it
  • in the left hand panel there's a "Cookies" item, click the chevron to the left of it to expand it
  • click on the line that says https://www.instagram.com
  • in the list of cookies like csrftoken, ig_cb, mid, and rur, there should also be a cookie called "sessionid"
  • copy the value of sessionid

Next, open Granary.io, and click on the Instagram logo. Granary will load up this url, and then you have to fill out some fields. You need to fill in your Instagram username, select @friends from the dropdown, select "atom" as your format, and paste the cookied ID you gathered above, into the last field where it says sessionid cookie (for @friends) and hit the GET button.

When Granary has done its thing, you'll end up with a link below the form. With the cookie value removed, mine looks like this:

https://granary.io/instagram/l3traset/@friends/@app/?format=atom&cookie=

This link holds your liberated Instagram photo feed. I plugged mine into my Feed Reader and into Aaron Parecki's Aperture and now I can read my Instagram feed on my phone using Indigenous, and on my desktop, all with no ads and no stories. Glorious!

Is anything lost?

Besides losing the ads and stories, you also lose the ability to favourite a post on Instagram, and to add comments to a post. However, I don't necessarily see this as a loss. If I want to Like a post, I can just do it on my own personal feed, and it ends up looking like this. Sure, if it's a post from a friend of mine, they won't know from their post, that I liked it. But you know how you can fix that? Write them an email. If your feed reader lets you email a post, you can email your friend saying you liked their picture.

Not being able to comment might be the biggest loss, but if you can live with that, then I think you should do it, go forth and liberate your Instagram feed.

This will definitely be the way I will consume Instagram until we've all moved over to Pixelfed.

P.S. I'm not sure how long the sessionid cookie lives for, so you might have to reconstruct the link in Granary once in a while, but that should be about it. Also, don't share that sessionid with anyone. I'm pretty sure it can be used to log into Instagram as you.

Jonas Voss

Yes, I noticed the email that Known sends to let me know that someone interacted with my post, had the quoted content and your comment mixed into one paragraph. Not sure where or how to fix that, but it could be that you need to deploy the fix you mention to more post types.

Jonas Voss

Got an email in my inbox for an event. In the marketing text, this section is included

"[...] and most importantly, amazing instagram photos to make your friends have serious FOMO."

That's when I instantly know, that I'm not supposed to go to this event.

Jonas Voss

Inboxen

What Is Inboxen?

Inboxen is a service that provides you with an infinite number of unique inboxes. It's not designed to replace your personal email address, but rather complement it. Every time a website asks for your email, click the "Add Inbox" button to create another email address. This leaves your personal address free from promotional offers and other junk mail.

Jonas Voss

When customer support goes bad

11 min read

TL;DR: I supported a Kickstarter project in 2014, and never received my product. When I got pushy on Twitter in 2017, the company blocked me, and stopped responding to my emails and tweets. I'm not the only one in this situation, but what can you actually do, except for posting extremely long and overly detailed posts like the below, to warn everyone else from doing business with lattis.io?

----

The Skylock sounded like a promising product aiming to IoT'ing bikelocks, making them network enabled, more convenient, and safer. Here's their marketing video from 3 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gyLPjDakAc. Gizmodo loved the idea (https://gizmodo.com/skylock-is-the-bike-lock-of-the-future-and-its-awesome-1576515407), The Verge was similarly excited (https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/15/5718442/skylock-is-a-keyless-solar-powered-bike-lock-that-just-la...)

As a happy bikecommuter having had a few bikes stolen in the past (and liking gadgets very much), I jumped on it as soon as I was made aware of it (by my friend Keith). In August 2014 I contributed money to back the Skylock, a Kickstarter project by Velo Labs, and I was looking forward to getting my sentient bike lock at the planned date. According to the Wayback machine snapshot from August 2014, it was supposed to ship in early 2015 (https://web.archive.org/web/20140807032952/https://skylock.cc/).

In the following year, Velo Labs regularly updated backers and beta users about progress, delays (it quickly became at least 1 year delayed), and roadmap. All things expected from a Kickstarter project.

In late September 2016 Skylock became Ellipse, by Lattis. Velo Labs was out, Lattis was in. The CEO explained the reason for the change, with the following paragraph in an announcement email, which also appeared on their website (https://lattis.io/blogs/posts/introducing-lattis):

We start anew as Lattis because this better captures our enthusiasm for simplifying life through an interconnected network of technologies. It’s bigger than just bikes. We’re here to serve urbanites who take pride in their city and understand their role in making it great. People who embrace design, technology, and change. There will be a lot more coming from us in the near future, so stay tuned.

A week later, I was asked to confirm my shipping details, so they could make sure I was still at the same address I had given when I backed it. I confirmed the details. A week later still, I got an email offering pre-orders for the Ellipse. Not relevant for me, but nevertheless exciting, because it meant they were closer to shipping!

In November 2016 I got an email saying that they had run into some more delays, but that they were sending the locks to the fulfilment centers on the 2nd of December, 2017. After that, it would take around 30 days to get the lock to the new owners. Given the amount of setbacks (remember, initially they operated with an early 2015 shipping date), I conservatively expected the lock to be in my hand by February 2017.

On the 22nd of December 2016 a new holiday email update arrived from Lattis. The first batch of Ellipse locks were now on a freighter on its way to North America, expected to arrive in January. It looked like my guess about a February arrival date for my lock might stick. They hadn't mentioned anything about European shipping dates, so just to be certain, I reach out to them on twitter, and asked them: https://twitter.com/voss/status/811732955525746688 - they replied that batches of the locks leaving the manufacturer in January, would be going to Europe. Shiny!

February 2017 comes around, and I write their support email to hear of any news regarding European shipping dates. I'm told, that demand has been so big, that their vendors couldn't cope with the volume. Still, their first European pre-orders will now start shipping in a few weeks, and I can expect 4-6 week delivery time after shipping, and more information in their next update.

Mid February, another email update rolls around. This time with their shipping schedule. Europe and international shipping will now start in March for the grey and blue lock, while the white lock will start shipping in June. I ordered the grey lock, so March it is for me. I then set my sight on April as the arrival for my lock.

Towards the end of April 2017 another email arrives, saying that they've fulfilled their North American pre-orders for grey and blue locks, and that the white ones will still ship in June. The email continues:

"We’re now shifting our focus to ramp up production and delivery for our customers around the world. We've already shipped out the first batch to our earliest supporters, with the balance of international pre-orders shipping out in batches over the next couple months".

Since I'm one of the early supporters of the Skylock, aka Ellipse (at least I think I am), I set my expectations for the lock to arrive in a few months. I set July as my target.

June 2017 comes around, and just to make sure everything is ok, I reach out to Lattis on twitter (https://twitter.com/voss/status/870962753258835969), and they tell me to get in touch with their support team, to confirm my address. I get in touch with their support (who answers very quickly (<24hrs) and is very helpful), I confirm my address, they say that the address they had for me, was incomplete. That's weird, because I had just confirmed it in October when they asked me to do so. They tell me they will make sure that my lock will be sent out in the next batch in July, and that I will receive a tracking number along with shipping notification when it happens.

And then, things started to get strange.

July 2017 is silent, both on email and their website, no updates. August 2017 comes around, and I write support to ask for an update on my shipment, as I haven't received a tracking number or a shipping notification yet. Support now takes 5 days to reply, and explain that their international shipping has been paused until further notice. They are in the process of hiring a new shipping company, and will let customers know when shipping resumes. I'm then offered to cancel my order and get a refund, if I'm not happy to wait. I reply that I'm happy to wait, since I've already waited 3 years for the lock. They say great, they are looking forward to getting the lock to me.

September 2017 comes around with no updates, and September becomes October 2017, still with no updates. I'm loosing my patience, and reach out to them on twitter (https://twitter.com/voss/status/918406033529344000). I point out that I've been waiting 3 years for the product, and that I find it weird, if their European shipping is on hold, that I can still order one on their website, without being informed that it's actually not currently shipping to Europe. They reply that they are still in business, and that my lock will ship "as soon as possible". I reply something snarky, pointing out that my lock has been in "as soon as possible" status since February, and that surely this can't be acceptable by their own standards. I don't think I hear anything back from them on that, so I write an email. 10 days later, they reply. They have a backlog, they are working hard, if I wan't to cancel my order they will refund me. I again say that I would very much like to have the lock that I paid for, and that I will continue to hold them accountable for getting the product into my hands.

In October, a week after I ask them for an update on the shipping status, they post an update to their blog (https://lattis.io/blogs/posts/shipping-update), explaining that they have failed their communications and shipping commitment to their backers, and that they are working hard on fixing it. As a case in point, that information was not sent to their customers via email, they only posted it to their website, as far as I know. So, yeh, they are still not fulfilling their communications commitment.

Guess what, it's now November 2017. I still haven't heard any news on my shipment. I reply to one of my emails to their support, where they offered to refund my order, that my patience is up, and that I would like to get a full refund. Surprisingly, I have heard nothing from them since then. They blocked me on Twitter, which I discovered in November as I tried to get in touch with them there, and couldn't mention them.

Per 24th of January 2018 they have a new update on their blog about new inventory being available, and shipping as fast as they can (but really they are most excited about talking about Bikeshare 1.0): https://lattis.io/blogs/posts/new-inventory-lattis-bikeshare-1-0

I wrote and asked them for an update on where my lock was, and got this reply back:

Thanks for reaching out support@lattis.io

Waiting on your order to ship?

We are shipping pre-orders in the order we received them. Please be patient!

We’ve shipped thousands of units to date, and we continue shipping units every week. 

 

An issue with your Ellipse?

That should be an easy fix 😉. Please try our FAQ with most common questions(link) or if you haven’t already provided that information, please reply to this email with the following information:

 

- Are the LEDs on the capacitive touchpad lighting up?

- Are you using a FB or Phone Number account? Do you still have access to that account?

- S/N of your Ellipse located under the QR code of the box (ex: CSD7100031)

 

Bike to the future!

The Lattis team

I'm not the only one in this situation, which does offer some consolation, but only sofar as I'm not the only one miffed. The last post on their Facebook page ((https://www.facebook.com/HelloLattis/posts/1332022596894346)) is from May, and while it announces that the Ellipse is now available in a store in Santa Monica, the comments bear witness to failing their commitment to their backers and pre-orderers.

Reactions to their latest post on their Facebook Page

Some commentators on that post write that they did indeed receive the product, but that it's terrible, and one person left a 1-star product review on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3O1OJEQGBJO6/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B...)

In general, the reviews on Amazon are less than favourable (48% 1-star reviews: https://www.amazon.com/Lattis-Ellipse-Keyless-Detection-Charcoal/product-reviews/B01NASEQH6/ref=cm_c...).

So, what to do next? They took my money 3.5 years ago, and I don't have the product I paid for. They don't reply to emails anymore (just automated replies). Last time I spoke with a human via email, they offered a refund. At that point they had been telling me for 6 months, that they would start international shipments very soon.

Can I do more than writing this, way too long, detailed, and for anyone not affected by this, boring, blogpost, to let others know that they should not do business with them?

Edit: I updated the title and TL;DR of my post to better reflect that I'm not criticising Kickstarter or crowdfunding platforms in general, my criticism is squarely pointed at lattis.io. Unfortunately I cannot change the URL of the post.

If you are also waiting for your lock to arrive, or have received a faulty lock, and are not having your support requests met, you can contact lockaction.org to provide them with your information. They are collecting victim information against Velo Labs/Lattis, for possible future actions.

An IndieWeb Webring 🕸💍

Jonas Voss