Clocked Information Technoloy

Annoying stupid smart functions in Google Workspace. For the context. I had enough of Bill Gates, his marketing and pushy sales force a long time ago. And have abandoned Microsoft completely in 2014. I never ever will buy anything from them again. Certainly, not ChatGTP (Babylon 2.0 in the making). And when Zuckerberg showed up, I rapidly saw he was a second Bill Gates and I never installed any app of him, and never will. So from US big tech, I only use Apple and Google stuff. Google and Apple are king in “thinking for you” in the wrong way . Consequently, making your live less efficient rather than more efficient. This writing is about that, based on example cases. The first disaster I experienced in this regard has been the day that Apple decided to organize my photo's for me. With as a consequence, my organization of my history was completely messed up. After a year, I decided to take all my images away from the iCloud and put them on Dropbox. Now I organize my history myself. W...

Large Language models have changed the research landscape. We (Clocked Subjects and Objects) always have been more than an IT and software company.  The emerging of DeepSeek, changes the research landscape. And this is only the beginning. We Clocked S O are a HumanSys engineering company. We use a wide range of knowledge to develop new ways for humanity to exist more efficient. And IT has always been a key tool for us to do so. This (after the emerging of DeepSeek) will go faster and faster. This blog will keep on focusing on the IT side of things. Next to this blog, we have the blog related to the Free world people initiative, where we cover global free humanity development observations. We use human assisted AI to follow developments (news) in the main areas of human science development, as we have identified them: EnergoSphere; BioSphere and KnowSphere. If we have comments on the developments, you can find them there every day.

Xojo is a fantastic, integrated development environment. With it, you can do multi-platform software development. I think there is no faster way to go from an idea to a running prototype. For MacOS, iOS, Windows, Android, WebApps. It can do it all. Xojo as an organization, itself has learned to develop fast. Something they have been struggling with in the past. The disadvantage of the focus of Xojo on continuous improvement with a relatively small organization causes some challenges in the users development process. Frequently it is impossible to finish a project after upgrading to a newer IDE version without redoing major parts of the code. Xojo when it starts up, gives a nice Recent Projects menu, where you can select a project you are working on and want to continue to work on. It does not separate in what version of Xojo you work on for what project, however. So if you have to maintain production code in an older version, the only save way too work is to have separate machines for ...

It is rather stupid that localization and language in web-apps are the same. They are not one, but separate classes. While US English is the dominant language in science, the old Roman Imperial measurement system is not. One should be able to use en-US for spelling etc. While using metric measure; ISO date format and in numbers the ‘,’ for thousand separator and the ‘.’ for decimal separator. So there is not 1 class, there are four: language; measure-system; dating-system and number-notation system.

Thanks to the virtual machine (VM) revolution, slowly but surely UX (unix like) operating systems are becoming the defacto industry standard. All Apple OS-es are UX based. Android is UX based. All internet is UX based. The whole Linux family of OS-es are UX based. The only remaining exception is Windows. The virtual machine revolution and cloud based (UX) computing is nail in the coffin for Windows however. Now  Google acquired Cameyo and with that brings Windows apps to ChromeOS. It is only a matter of time and all the functionality only available on Windows will be available as a SaaS or ( first  in VM mode) on Linux. All companies (for example SolidWorks ) start to offer SaaS, forced by the market. They feel the pressure  of OnShape . Most development work is already done on Linux based machines. Windows is also becoming legacy because there is extra cost involved to make apps for Windows compatible  with the newest generation of hardware (linke Tablets). This is...

Abstract Legal systems should enable good public services, not just complicate things. We (the people) don't really need governments, we need good public services. These days, too little is done to ensure a level playing field for companies on a global scale. Enabling big companies to lock buyers into their influence sphere and squeeze as much as possible money out of them. Below three examples where our public services fail. Selling hardware with preinstalled OS should be illegal If a consumer buys a smartphone or a personal computer, it is always sold with an operating system preinstalled. This fixes the consumer into the commercial influence sphere of the hardware seller. Apparently, the Brussels bureaucracy is not really interested in a plane playing field that enables European suppliers to participate in the smartphone and desktop computing market. Would Brussels really be interested in a plane playing field, it would not be allowed to sell end-user devices (smartphones and pe...

Alphabet Inc. should rebrand their Other than search and advertising business if they want to make serious business from it. The “Google” brand name is for a large part of the world associated with sneaky advertising practices. Not with a solid IT service supplier. Consequently, the other than search related products under the brand name “Google” are avoided. Why do I think this is the case? I started early with Google (then Suite) Workspace and supported several small businesses in the Netherlands to switch from Microsoft Exchange to Gmail. I also helped them with implementing Drive and G-Suite. After initial enthusiasm, I can see them all going back to Microsoft Office. They just trust the Microsoft brand more for the desktop. If Alphabet really wants to make a serious business out of Workspace, they need to brand it outside the Google brand as a separate division under Alphabet.

On 2 January again a runway incident happened. Known as the 2024 Haneda Airport runway collision . This kind of accidents should not happen on modern runways used in a high frequency. In this article, we sketch an architecture of a simple and cost-effective system that we think should be used to reduce the possibility of this kind of disasters happening again.  We made a draft design for a system to r educe the possibility of this kind of disasters happening again. More on this on our website

Apple was on the forefront of human interfacing. Not only technical but also emotional. The better feel of Apple products! In one area, however, they missed the boat. The keyboard! Google with their Chromebooks are catching up on the feel and user experience. Their keyboard experience is even better than the MacBook experience. Just take a look at the keys left of the space bar on a MacBook and the ChromeBook.    MacBook ChromeBook Apple needs 4 keys! Google only 2! Industry standard knows the Control and Alt key. But Apple has the strange legacy from the early days of Apple computing called the Command key. Apple wake up! Linux has become the industry standard (not knowing the Command key concept). Much more user would switch from Windows to macOS if they were not hindered by the stupid Apple keyboard legacy. Google makes the switch experience smooth. Apple makes it hard. Guess who will win?

How do you contact a person with your mobile phone? FaceTime? Signal? WhatsApp? Call? Is it not about time to rephrase Phone Number into Contact Number?

Let's start by explaining a use case and the confusion it gives due to poor nomenclature in the crypto-world. The case of me giving a so-called private-key to someone, so I can send the person an encrypted message with the pared public-key, so only the receiver can open it. In this use case, in fact, I make a private-key public and assume the public-key to be private. This use case makes clear that the naming of private-key and public-key are a poor semantic choice. It is a poor choice because depending on the use case, the private-key can be public and the other way around. We better call the private-key just the encryption-key, and the public-key an encryption-vault. Let's then revisit the example use case now with the new naming. The case of me giving a so-called encryption-key to someone, so I can send the person an encrypted message in an encryption-vault, so only the receiver can open it. We have 4 clearly define objects now: public-encryption-key private-encryption-key...

The need for home servers, and what functions it needs to perform. A way to look at a home is as it being a thing on the mobile internet. Just like a mobile phone. What if you have an off grid (for electricity) home and the internet is down? And how to shield the home from unwanted data outflow from the home? I can see the need for a new kind of Network Attached Storage (NAS) what covers these scenarios. To cover these scenarios, you need a NAS with additional functionalities: In-home SSL Cloud mirroring Intrusion detection In-home SSL In house network security should be no different from the field data security. The current Root Certificate system (RCS) was never designed to cover this scenario. Another (outside the scope of this item) weakness of the current RCS, is that it is DNS dependent. Cloud mirroring Most users are using (also business users) their mobile phone as their primary data communication device and User Interface (UI). And to be global portable they use a Cloud serv...

The unreliable ID? In many articles, the IT industry complains about the fussy nature of the phone number as a reliable ID. For example, in this article . What wend wrong? The ITU It was original set up by governments to resolve international issues on standards for telecommunication. One of their standards is the Telephone numbering plan . This telephone numbering plan was set up in a time of fixed landlines, never considering mobile personal use. Who has ownership? Let's have a look at the international public telecommunication numbering plan E.164 . The first 3 digits are the country code or country calling code . Counties control the subscribers assignment in the networks of the member countries. So countries have jurisdiction over the subscriber assignment in the country networks. In that regard, the county calling code is the jurisdiction code ! National governments have ownership! To me, it looks like governments fail to provide the public service we (the people) could expe...

No variable declaration Python does not know variables declaration. Nice for starting programmers. But it comes at a cost. Python (under the hood) needs to find out what type of variable it deals with. This is done in a smart way, but also at a calculation-time and energy cost. Is it worth the effort? I don't think so. Computing always is about modeling the real world in one or the other way. And also in the real world, it is essential to know the type of variable one is dealing with. And most of the time the unit of measurement is loosely interpreted in programming. Sometimes causing real disasters. Why then making programmers neglecting the real nature of what they are programming and stay in tough with the real world at the cost of the program speed (time and energy)? The better way It would be better to have a variable declaration including the applied unit of measure. That way, the program stays in touch with the real physical environment it is used for. And the program does n...

The GNOME platform has new components, tools and docs. There's never been a better time to make apps for Linux. https://developer.gnome.org The trend is that user interface definition languages converge into what is done by the W3C . The open source communities, Google and Apple are moving all in the same direction. CSS increasingly plays an important role in all graphic design. For web and desktop.

  Today, Microsoft announced https://cloudpc.im/. After they announced Windows 11. After the Windows 11 announcement, it rapidly became clear nearly no existing Windows 10 will be able to be upgraded to Windows 11. No coincidence. They want to move all customers to monthly payments. Soon you only can run Word, Excel and PowerPoint in a browser. Just like with Google! So what is the difference? It is all the same! You lost control over your data and your wallet!  What will be the countermovement?

  Naar aanleiding van het uitstekende artikel van Fred Hage in de Computable van  27 november 2020. Overheden worstelen met End-to-end encryptie en ‘lawful interception’. Met andere woorden privacy op internet aan de ene kant en de mogelijkheid criminaliteit te onderzoeken aan de andere kant. Het blijft me verbazen dat overheden blind zijn voor de kansen die dit dilemma biedt! Stel "ik kan bij de NL-overheid mijn encryptie regelen" (met de wetenschap dat ze mee kunnen kijken). Dan doe ik dat toch zolang ik niets te verbergen heb! Dus: Overheid wordt eens wakker en bied zelf encryptie services aan! Ga met de betrokken internet diensten zoals Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft .. etc. om de tafel zitten en ontwikkel encryptiediensten en standaards voor (vertrouwde) burgers waar ze gebruik van kunnen maken. De diensten kunnen dan vertrouwd verkeer van onvertrouwd verkeer onderscheiden. Ze kunnen vertrouwd verkeer direct, eventueel automatisch, onderzoeken. En me...

 In my earning norm model , I have lowered the scale-up to adapt to the crisis. What is the scale-up? The scale-up is the gross salary multiplier from the scale below. So from the bottom salary every next scale salary is multiply with the scale-up from the lower scale. This scale-up was 1.45 (thus + 45%). But this figure will come down the coming time because of the economic insecure times we are about to experience. Depending on the economic developments it probably has to be lowered in the coming months. I will follow the developments and adapt the model accordingly. Scale up It is now 1.3 (+30%)

I was ready with ChromeCast when Google stopped with Chromcast Audio. So I was looking for an alternative. For audio, I found SnapCast . The best open source solution I could find. Not perfect and not general user-friendly but manageable for me. For my TV spot I found Kodi on LibreElec apears to be the best solution for the time being to replace Chromecast. There again not as user-friendly as Apple TV or Chromecast but manageable for me. The Raspberry-Pi is need little thing and in the Flirc case it looks great. But I have two issues to be resolved before I can move on in getting out of it what I want (Running Firefox on it): Good support for Debian 64 bit Good graphical hardware acceleration When these are resolved, the Raspberry Pi will spark a revolution in the computer landscape.

Migrate safe away from email With the mobile phone now becoming the standard human interface for information and communication services it is time to stop using email. There is enough information on the web to find out why. Here is an example: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/can-email-ever-be-secure/ What are the alternatives? For now, we see is only one alternative: https://www.signal.org/ in combination with document share services and document send services like Dropbox, iCloud, Google-drive and so on. We will have the following text under our emails in the future. Because email is an old and insecure first generation internet protocol we will  in time stop  to use email. If you want to contact us and are not known with us, you can use the web contact form. If you are known with us you can use our signal account to chat, or we share an exchange environment.