Kane Hsieh

A month ago, I commented on the sensationalist reporting surrounding Cody Wilson, the founder of Defense Distributed, and 3D printed firearms. In a nutshell, Defense Distributed could claim to have 3D printed a “gun” because of a technicality in the legal definition of a gun – only one part of an AR15 rifle requires federal paperwork, so if you can print that one part, you’ve printed a “gun.”

Last week, however, Cody Wilson revealed the files for The Liberator, a .38 caliber pistol that can be entirely 3D printed (well, almost – you need to add a small metal pin). Cue dramatic reporters.

In no time, junior reporters everywhere were suddenly experts on 3D printing on firearms, and couldn’t wait to chime into the discussion. In fact, the British tabloid The Daily Mail decided to pull what they proclaimed to be a “security scandal” in what has to be one of the laziest pieces of investigative reporting around 3D printed firearms yet (granted, they are a tabloid, so they get a handicap).

In the article, Mr. Murphy and Mr. Meyers got their hands on a £1, 700 (~$2,600) 3D printer and made a plastic pistol – and then proceeded to board the EuroStar train with it. After taking a few self-aggrandizing photos of them posing on the train with their Liberator, they cried security scandal.

It’s clear that not once during their reporting did the reporters talk to anyone with any knowledge of 3D printing, firearms, or security. Here’s why:

• The Defense Distributed Liberator was printed on a $30K Dimension 1200es printer at 0.25mm precision. Look at the difference in precision between what Defense Distributed produces and what The Daily Mail produced. You can SEE how poorly made and asymmetrical the pins of The Daily Mail’s Liberator are:

  Left: The Daily Mail; Right: Defense Distributed

• Mr. Murphy admits to not having test fired his Liberator, and for good reason. A pistol is not something you can use just because it looks “about right” – Mr. Murphy’s Liberator is more likely to blow his own hand off than to be a dangerous weapon, making him less the techno-anarchist gunman he claims to be and more like the world’s best-dressed and least effective suicide bomber.

• The Liberator is good for one .38 caliber shot from an unrifled, plastic barrel before you have to change the barrel and reload. Now, I’m not trying to undermine the danger of a .38 pistol – but a $2,600 printer to get off one inaccurate .38 shot is not a security scandal. It’s over-engineering what rednecks and reckless kids in growing up in backwater towns (cough) have known about for years: zipguns. It’s not hard to get one bullet to fire, it’s a lot harder to get a second bullet to fire; assuming you can even get a bullet through security (Mr. Murphy got a plastic gun through security, but no bullets, which are easy to find at security checkpoints), you’re good for one wildly inaccurate shot.

  You’ve over-engineered a knife or a baseball bat, and one that might blow off your hand at that.

  In the above video, our friendly PrepperKip has made a 12 ga. shotgun with a pipe, some duct tape, and utter disregard for personal safety. It cost 1/100th of the price of the Liberator to make, and it’s a lot more powerful.

Yes, 3D printing will get more precise and cheaper and one day 3D printed firearms will pose an interesting security challenge. That will require policy makers to make important decisions to regulate a new form of distribution, which in turn will require the cooperation of courts, the ATF, industry players, and state and federal governments. Getting all parties to play nicely and be reasonable is already hard enough as it is – the worst thing that we can do is to start off on the wrong foot with uninformed, breathlessly sensationalist reporting, fear mongering, and gross misrepresentation of what the technology is actually capable of.

When the iPhone 5 and the iPad Mini came out, people joked that you would be able to own a comprehensive gradient of screen sizes between phone and tablet. Well, if you consider both Android and iOS, that turns out to be the case now:

If you’ve walked into a Best Buy (people still do that, right?) recently or tried to browse online for a new phone or tablet, you’ve probably been overwhelmed by the choices. This overwhelming indecisiveness (#firstworldproblems) is known as “consumer fatigue,” and Rahul Raghavan gives a pretty good summary on Quora:

• Providing choice is very good up to a point. Even minor variations in product that provide a very superficial “choice” to consumers is beneficial (buyers find it empowering, sales go up).
• Beyond this, paradoxically, too much choice overwhelms people to the extent that they end up paralyzed and don’t choose anything. There are cases where reducing the number of variants of a product leads to increased sales (a famous experiment involving jams).
• If you have to provide a lot of choice, divide the variants into a small number of clearly delineated categories, with a small number of choices in each category. Consumers then quickly choose their category of interest, then choose the product their want – Two less taxing choices are better than one large choice.
• Some research suggests that the number of options where “good choice” becomes “bad choice” is about 7 – the same as Miller’s Magic Number 7, the number of things that may be held in working memory by the average human.

A few years ago, one could have attributed consumer fatigue in the smartphone market to the novelty of the smartphone industry and companies taking a see-what-sticks approach to product design, which is common in young markets. My colleague Tom Loverro wrote a similar post two years ago about the state of the phone industry then.

But what explains the fatigue now? After the surge and death of many designs that accompany a growing industry, companies left standing quickly trim to what works and thereby reduce consumer fatigue. HTC rose from lowly OEM to brand-name prominence by churning out dozens of Android phones during the smartphone boom of 2011, and quickly came crashing back down in 2012. HTC then declared that it would focus on  “less product, more exposure on those” - the result of which is the aptly-named HTC One. Samsung’s website now only features its successful Galaxy line of Android phones. Apple is the only outlier, having been extraordinarily conservative with SKUs – iPhone and only iPhone – and made itself king of the smartphone market before branching out into tablets and other form factors. It has actually increased its consumer offerings during the swell and die-off in the smartphone market.

We go back to Rahul’s point: if you have to provide a lot of choice, divide the variants into a small number of clearly delineated categories. It turns out that within brands, manufacturers have actually done a decent job of reducing fatigue and providing sets of choices:

Samsung’s offerings provide the same set of choices as Apple’s: phone versus tablet, small versus big. The relatively rare Galaxy Mega I will discount as a dying breath of Samsung’s make-all-the-phones philosophy.

Now, consumer fatigue arises when we conflate the reasonable choices that independent manufacturers offer. As a result of a mind-numbingly inefficient IP law system, every manufacturer is arriving at the same set of choices just slightly differently than every other manufacturer to avoid getting sued - and the result is our wonderfully messy gradient of choices.

In a clear example of competition and patent law hurting the consumer, smartphone manufacturers are doing a lot of redundant work (Apple maps) and forcing each other to find kludgey workarounds (no Google ActiveSync in iOS using Microsoft Exchange?). Although the industry is moving beyond the point where there are more SKUs per manufacturer than you can count on two hands, there’s still a lot of progress to be made in patent law and protocol standardization before we reach the sort of techno utopia that all TED Talks seem to be all about these days.

Last month, Defense Distributed successfully fired over 600 rounds from an AR-15 using a 3D printed lower receiver. Since then there has been a lot of controversy, knee-jerk reactions, and downright bad reporting surrounding the 3D printing of firearms. Ars Technica, who broke the news, wrote that the lower receiver “contains all of the gun’s operating parts,” which is simply not true. The upper receiver contains at least as many discrete parts; furthermore, out of the 200+ discrete parts need to construct Distributed Defense’s AR-15, only one – the unassembled lower receiver – was 3D printed.

So what does all of this really mean for the general public? I tried to print my own AR-15 to find out, and it turns out the reality of the situation is a lot duller than the “crypto-anarchy” run by militant technologists so vividly painted by popular press.

What is a gun?

This question might seem facetious, but it’s actually more nuanced than most people realize. To truly understand the implications of Defense Distributed 3D-printed AR-15, it’s important to understand what the ATF’s legal definition of a “gun” with regards to an AR-15 actually is.

It turns out the the ATF’s definition of a gun is kind of silly. Only the lower receiver is considered a firearm by the ATF and restricted; the rest of the AR-15, all 199ish parts, can be mail ordered directly to your door from your favorite manufacturer.

So all Defense Distributed really did was print one out of over 200 parts of an AR-15, then skillfully assembled the remainder into a functioning AR-15. The reason they can claim to have printed a gun is because the part they printed happened to be the only (arbitrarily) restricted part of the AR-15.

It’s important to note that Defense Distributed used a $30,000 Dimension printer to 3D print their lower receiver. If you have access to that kind of equipment, you probably also have access to a tool shop – and if you do, you can save effort AND time by just buying a completely legal, unrestricted ”80% lower receiver” and completing it yourself instead of 3D printing the thing.

Printing my AR-15

Just how accessible and dangerous are 3D printed guns then? To find out, I tried to get an AR-15 lower receiver printed. For the purpose of this experiment let’s just assume I’m not in one of the many of states in which I can just go to Walmart and buy an AR-15.

First, I tried to use to use makexyz.com, where you can rent time on 3D printers from their owners. I submitted the necessary files to a few local printers, and got the following responses (most printers did not respond):

I can create a STL from the STEP file provided.  Unfortunately, It is company policy not to print gun accessories or parts for weapons unless it is for a certified and federally regulated contractor.

and:

The prospects of 3d Printing parts for firearms is a costly and dangerous venture. The materials do not hold up to firing a bullet and end up causing catastrophic results for the weapon and possibly injure the user. Be careful and best of luck with your project!

Fine. It seems like the MakeXYZ community is a good upstanding crowd that self-polices. Well, I do have access to $2000 MakerBot Replicator 2′s- the most well-supported and widely available consumer 3D printer. Let’s see if I can produce the receiver on that.

It turns out that after many hours of trying, a consumer-grade 3D printer is only able to make a warped, imprecise, and completely unusable AR-15 lower receivers. The MakerBot can’t even complete 20% of the lower receiver before the kinks manifest and turn the receiver into a clump of molten warped plastic. In the amount of time it took for MakerBot to try and fail just three times, I could have driven to upstate NY and legally walked out of a sporting goods store with as many AR-15′s as I could carry (NY State doesn’t require permits for long rifles, but NY City does).

The Reality

MakeXYZ wasn’t the impromptu arms bazaar that many feared it would be. In fact, most providers seem to be wary of anything potentially firearm related. At the same time consumer 3D printers aren’t able to print with nearly enough precision to make usable receivers.

In practice, not only are 3D printed guns limited to a select few that have machines that cost tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but saying you can 3D print a gun is like 3D printing the handlebar of a bicycle and claiming you can print bicycles.  The only reason people can say “I 3D printed a gun” is because the law narrowly defines guns by arbitrary components rather than Platonic forms of gun-ness. So while technically Ars Technica was correct in saying a “gun” was 3D printed, this is only because of the ATF’s convoluted legislation.

So 3D printing guns isn’t really an issue – for now. But printers will get cheaper and cheaper as they get faster and more precise. The real issue is the fragmented, poorly-enforced firearms laws in a world where additive manufacturing is becoming a very real technology; in the same way that copyright laws needed to be reexamined in the context of digital distribution and privacy laws needed to be reexamined in the context of social networks and smart phones, laws governing the manufacturing of firearms need to be reexamined in the context of additive manufacturing technologies such as 3D printing.

Over the next few years, legislators will have to carefully think through how 3D printing will augment firearms accessibility and legislate meaningfully with that in mind. However, given the current state of firearms regulation in the US, freaking out about 3D printed guns is like freaking out over burnt cookies when your house is on fire. Or, as Willard Foxton put it, if you can 3D print a gun at home you’re welcome to shoot me with it.

I first read George Orwell’s 1984 in 2007. Ironically, I read 1984 in Beijing to kill time because Gmail was censored and I couldn’t get any work done.

The copy I had was a mass-market Signet Classic edition printed on pulpy paper. The  cover design was more Minority Report  dystopia than 1984 dystopia. As a bibliophile, I was less than enthused by this edition.

Earlier this year, when I heard David Pearson was designing a cover for a new Penguin version of 1984, I was eager to get my hands on what I thought would be a collection-worthy version of the great novel. Unfortunately, the cover design turned out to be more of an ad for Penguin, and Pearson pushed the censorship design elements too far as to be impractical (seriously, you can barely read it).

I quickly forgot about finding a good copy of 1984 until yesterday, when a Elizabeth Perez unveiled her cover design for another great dystopian classic, Fahrenheit 451.

I was inspired to design my own cover for 1984, taking inspiration from both Pearson and Perez. After a few iterations, the final result is something that co-opts the core design elements from Pearson’s cover while maintaining the readability and visual impact of Perez’s cover.

My first experience with Tesla was almost exactly two years ago. On November 8, 2010, a showroom Tesla Roadster on its way to NYC ran low on charge in Cambridge and pulled into Lowell House courtyard to borrow the laundry room’s power.

The next day, I made an excuse to meet the engineer that had driven it up, and I traded some product photography for a short test drive.

The Roadster felt like a glorified go-kart. Sure, it accelerated incredibly fast, but given its comically small cabin, bumpy ride (the Lotus frame on which it is based is also comically small), and lack of power steering (not so good for Cambridge streets), you almost felt as if the ungodly responsive acceleration was owed to you.

The Roadster felt like something someone with too much money would own for short highway drive or track days, but not really a car. I thought it was a really cool test bed for EV technology, but still an immature product. Now, in 2012, the Tesla Model S has fixed all of that.

The Tesla Model S is really the first Tesla car. Three rows of seats, 52/48 weight split, effective 89 MPG, and giggle-inducing performance that put an M5 to shame: the Model S is such a mind-blowingly impressive car that Automobile Mag named it its 2013 Car of the Year.

Except it has one major flaw.

The entire dashboard is one giant touchscreen. “But hey, that’s so modern. So Tesla,” you might say. And you would be right – but this is where Tesla’s desire to distinguish itself from any old performance sedan ended up shooting itself in the foot.

Think about a car’s dashboard for a second. It’s populated with analog controls: dials, knobs, and levers, all of which control some car subsystem such as temperature, audio, or navigation. These analog dials, while old, have two features: tactility and physical analogy. Respectively, this means you can feel for a control, and you have an intuition for how the control’s mechanical action affects your car (eg: counterclockwise on AC increases temperature). These small functions provide a very, very important feature: they allow the driver to keep his or her eyes on the road.

Except for a the privileged few that have extraordinary kinesthetic sense of where our hands are, the Model S’s control scheme is an accident waiting to happen. Hell, most of us can barely type with two hands on an iPhone. Now a Model S driver has to manage all car subsystems on a touchscreen with one hand while driving.

I’m not saying the touchscreen is bad idea. It’s a fantastic idea if implemented correctly. This means taking advantage of the screen’s digital nature with gestures recognized anywhere on the screen, and feedback in some form such as audio confirmation (preferably in an aloof, British accent). The driver can stay focused on the road, and the touchscreen provides functionality beyond the analog controls its replacing.

Instead, Tesla has chosen to use the touchscreen as an over-engineered version of the analog controls. Digital buttons and sliders make up most of the interface. A touchscreen will never convincingly replicate a button, but it doesn’t need to. By doing so, it neither fulfills its full potential as a next generation control system, nor does it accurately replicate what it’s trying to replace. Imagine if the inventor of the cello insisted that it play violin parts. It’s possible if you try really hard, but everyone was better off that the cello music exploited a cello’s defining lower register instead of crappily playing violin parts.

Tesla’s focus on the Model S touchscreen console was a major and potentially dangerous step in the wrong direction. BMW’s Heads Up Display got it right: use technology in radical new ways that analog displays couldn’t – by placing important data in the driver’s field of view so eyes could stay on the road. At least the M5 has something to be happy about.

E-books will never replace paper books. But they don’t have to.

Comparing books to e-books is like comparing mechanical watches to digital watches, or manual cars to automatic cars. No one doubts the convenience, reach, and flexibility of the e-book format, but it will never convincingly replicate the experience of a paper book – nor does it need to. E-books are a fundamentally new medium, stuck in an awkward growing stage.

The problem with e-books as they exist now is the lack of user experience innovation. Like the first television shows that only played grainy recordings of theater shows, the e-book is a new medium that has yet to see any true innovation, and resorts to imitating an old medium. This is obvious in skeuomorphic visual cues of e-book apps. Designers have tried incredibly hard to mimic the page-turns and sound effects of a real book, but these ersatz interactions satisfy a bibliophile as much as a picture of water satisfies a man in the desert.

There is no reason I need to turn fake pages. If I’m using a computer to read, I should be able to leverage the connectivity and processing power of that computer to augment my reading experience: e-books should allow me to read on an infinite sheet, or I should be able to double blink to scroll. I should be able to practice language immersion by replacing words and phrases in my favorite books with other languages, or highlight sections to send to Quora or Mechanical Turk for analysis. There are endless possibilities for e-books to make reading more accessible and immersvie than ever, but as long as e-books try to be paper books, they will remain stuck in an uncanny valley of disappointment.

Another misstep in the growth of e-books was the complete incompatability of previous libraries. People who have amassed libraries of paper books over many years were left behind by e-book distributors. Unlike music or photographs, there is no way to migrate an old book library into a new one. Over the past decade, I’ve been able to convert my tapes to CDs, my CDs to MP3s, and now import my MP3s into Spotify and listen to music over the cloud. Yet, if I want to read my favorite books on my Nexus 7, I have to pay for a separate e-book version, assuming one even exists.

It makes sense to have a third tier of book: paper + digital access. I am more than willing to pay a little extra for a book if it means that I have a copy for my library shelves and I can read it on a tablet on the subway. Amazon in particular is well positioned to implement this pricing structure. Better yet, why not a subscription service? $20/mo for all the books I can read? Unfortunately, as of now, the only options for paper book fans that want to use e-books for convenience are to pay twice, or maintain two disjoint book libraries. Like its content, e-book pricing models cling to the past.

The full potential of e-books lies in its digital nature. Distribution costs are zero. The paradigm of a “book” – a chunk of a few hundred pages of writing, is no longer necessary to be cost effective. Authors can distribute serialized portions of stories on a regular basis, and reach millions of readers instantly. All the things that made the internet culture grow – memes, viral content, instant sharing – can be leveraged by writers of e-books. Authors, no longer dependent on publishers, are afforded previously unheard of flexibility with story telling. A novella can seamlessly grow into a thousand page epic, one chapter a week, urged by a growing fan base. Small steps in this direction are being made by companies such as Plympton, but it would be unwise to underestimate the potential for new sources of content through the democratization of publication.

So e-books, stop trying to be paper books; break free of the page and the book paradigms and realize your potential as a fully digital medium. As for me, and readers like me, you will never replace our beloved paper books – but if done correctly, I will be proud to own a library of e-books. Until then, I only use you to avoid carrying books like IQ84 in my backpack.

This past weekend, my good friends Lisa and Dan were married in Canton, Massachusetts.

I had browsed through the registry to find a gift suitable for the newlyweds, but the list of registered gifts turned out to be a little boring (sorry, Lisa). Fortunately, with the help of danger!awesome in Cambridge, MA, I was able to make the “Henckels Classic 8-Inch Carving Knife” from the registry a little bit more interesting.

“But isn’t the engraving a little morbid?” some of you have asked. Considerably less morbid than you’d think, actually.

I started college 2008 as most do: slightly insecure, uncertain about what I wanted to do with my life, and certain that everyone else had it figured out. My first two years were not terrible, but not especially good either. Going from top student in an Upstate New York hamlet to barely within one sigma of mean (to the left) in college was a bit jarring.

On April 26th, 2010, during a particularly rough personal crises, I was chatting online with Dan. He clearly had more important things to do than deal with a sophomore’s problems (like date mutual friend and future-fiancee Lisa) but he stayed on gtalk nonetheless.

Daniel: a side note

don’t hate. dominate. always remember that

me: this is with respect to what?

lol

Daniel: everything

but specifically with regard to yourself

I’m not sure what prompted him to type that little aphorism. He may have heard it somewhere and thought it particularly witty, or it may have been a rhyme he came up with on the spot. Regardless, that was one of the most important things I took away from college. In three short words it rolls together many mantras, old and new: don’t sweat the small stuff, roll with the punches, haters gonna hate, etc. “Don’t hate. Dominate.” became one of the cornerstones of my worldview, and the attitude with which I would take on Harvard and ultimately post-college life.

Fast forward to August, 2012. Thanks to Dan and Lisa’s mentorship over the past four years, I’ve learned make the best of people and situations (good and bad) and appreciate the very fortunate life that I have as a result of equal parts work and luck. I have a lot to be thankful for today; among many people, events, and leaps of faith that brought me to where I am now, I am lucky to include Lisa, Dan, and “Don’t hate. Dominate.”

Congratulations, Lisa and Dan.

In 2010, Gizmodo described the Samsung Galaxy Tab, a 7″ Android tablet available through Verizon, as “the worst of a tablet and the worst of a phone,” and I agreed. The Tab and Android 2.2 Froyo were laggy and overpriced. Why Samsung thought they could sell a $599 7″ Android tablet when the iPad was $499 is beyond me.

Weighing in at $199, the Asus Nexus 7 is a completely different story.

The wild success of the Nexus 7 launch can be attributed to three  forces: the rapid cost reduction of quality hardware, the polish of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and the development of tablet-specific apps in a maturing Google Play Store (formerly App Market).

Hardware

I like the 7″ form factor. The iPad’s 10″ screen makes it a two-handed device, and I cannot think of situations where I would be comfortable using an iPad but not a small fast laptop (I still use dead-trees when it comes to reading). I concede that the iPad could replace a laptop for someone who does not do processor-intensive work and didn’t already have a small laptop. For me, given the heft of the iPad 3 (The New iPad? whatever), it seemed silly to carry an iPad when it was so close in size to a Macbook Air or a Thinkpad X220.

In contrast, the Nexus 7 is in a separate league of devices. Comparing the Nexus 7 and the iPad is like comparing a sports car to a luxury sedan. They’re just different. The 7″ form factor makes the Nexus 7 one-hand device, similar to a pulp paperback. I can reasonably use the Nexus 7 on public transport or in a long line for coffee (or anywhere you would read a paperback).

The front of the Nexus 7 is a single sheet of Gorilla Glass with no hardware buttons framed by a beveled steel case. The black plane is only interrupted by a single centered front-facing camera above the screen. The result is quite handsome, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple attempted to get an injunction on the Nexus 7 in the near future.  Thanks to the perforated black leatherette wrapped around its back, the Nexus 7 sits in the hand comfortably, and the whole device just exudes quality.

Input/output placement is pretty standard. The only hardware buttons are a power/standby button and volume rockers on the right side, and the micro USB charging port and 3.5mm audio jack are on the bottom of the frame. Some people prefer the audio jack on the top of the device, but I find that placing the audio jack on the bottom prevents errant cables from draping over the screen during use. A single speaker grille runs along the bottom of the back. The speakers are surprisingly loud and usable, with very little distortion or tinniness at max volume. I was able to use the Nexus 7 to provide background music at a small gathering.

Unfortunately, the Nexus 7 is wifi only. I would have liked to have seen at least a 3G option. The Nexus 7 is the perfect size for short trips where I pack lightly, but the lack of 3G severely cripples the Nexus 7′s usefulness on long bus rides or trains.

Some have complained about the lack of rear camera. I consider using a tablet to take pictures a misdemeanor at least, so this does not bother me, especially since anywhere I have the Nexus 7 I would also have my iPhone 4s and its unmatched mobile camera (it was used to take the photos for this review).

Compared to plasticky Android phones (even the Samsung Galaxy Nexus feels awkwardly light), the Nexus 7 has a comfortable heft and svelte-ness to it. Small touches like the steel frame and pebbled back make the Nexus 7 feel like a well-designed product, unlike many of its Android tablet predecessors.

Operating System

In terms of features and polish, I consider Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to be the first true Android competitor to iOS. With Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, Google augments the Ice Cream Sandwich experience with Project Butter, making the OS even smoother than before.

A lot of the differences between Jelly Bean and Ice Cream Sandwich are subtle interface tweaks that increase the usability of Android, but the biggest and most obvious change is the integration of Google Now. Holding down the home button or doing a Google search results in a set of ‘cards’ appearing above your search results based on time, location, personal data (calendar, contacts), and Google’s best guess. It’s basically dynamic iGoogle for mobile with a sleek interface. I was skeptical about Now, but it has been consistently giving coherent results so I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

Google’s Nexus line has been trying to remove as many hardware buttons as possible, so Android’s Home, Back, and Menu buttons have been relegated to the operating system. While this maintains the Nexus 7′s uninterrupted glass face, it means that I find myself accidentally closing apps while playing games that involve rapid tapping across the screen.

The one annoyance I’ve found with Jelly Bean is the lack of Adobe Flash support. I was excited about the prospect of lounging around and watching the Colbert Report, but Google’s officially not supporting Flash in Android 4.1+. Given that iPad doesn’t support flash either, it’s not a huge deal when deciding between tablets, but up until now Flash was a feature that Android had that iOS didn’t.

All in all, there’s really not much to say about Jelly Bean – it’s an evolutionary improvement over the really good Ice Cream Sandwich, rather than a revolutionary new OS. For people who live their lives in Google Apps, Android’s native integration are a boon. The only reason I would explicitly choose iOS over Jelly Bean is if I was already heavily invested in iPad apps, or if I wanted a 10″ tablet. Otherwise it’s a tossup.

Software

In I/O 2012, Google rolled out its strategies for a two-fronted war with Apple and Microsoft over content distribution for mobile and for the living room, respectively. This is immediately apparent with the Nexus 7′s massive Play Library widget on the home screenout-of-the-box. They also give out $25 to the Play store with every Nexus 7 to entice you to migrate to Google Play. I’m quite happy with Spotify for music, Kindle for books, and torrents the Internet for movies, so I quickly deleted the massive library widget and added my own apps to the home screen.

One of the biggest problems that plagued the Tab and the iPad in 2010 was the lack of tablet-optimized apps. Tablets ran mobile apps stretched to a larger resolution, resulting in a pretty lame user experience. Apple was quick to standardize iPad-friendly apps, but given the hardware fragmentation of Android tablets, they were never able to achieve the same standardized quality. This crappy experience is why the Tab, Xoom, Transformer, etc. all failed.

Google recognized this problem prior to the Nexus 7 launch, and has made tremendous headway in improving the Android tablet experience. The new Play Store  features a Staff Picks for Tablets section, with Google curated apps designed for tablets.

Compared to iOS, the big draw of Android is native Google integration. For those of you who are symbiotically fused with Gmail like me, the Nexus 7 will not disappoint. The tablet optimized Gmail app incorporates all of Gmail’s features and labels, taking full advantage of the Nexus 7′s increased screen estate. The rest of the Google Suite apps (Maps, Calendar, Reader, Wallet, etc) similarly take advantage of Android’s Google integration.

Unfortunately, some major apps such as Twitter do not have an Android-tablet optimized version despite having an iPad optimized version. This means that the screen space is not used as well as it could be, and that the text is somewhat over-anti-aliased. It’s surprising and a little disappointing that major apps such as Twitter have not invested in the Android tablet experience, given its market size dominance by user count.

Overall, the Jelly Bean software experience is lightyears ahead of what the Samsung Tab (and even the iPad) provided two years ago. The trade-off you make between Jelly Bean and iOS is the Google apps experience versus the rest of the apps. Given that iOS is still the dominant app marketplace in terms of revenue, I expect that the third party app experience for Android will always lag behind iOS; however, Google apps run flawlessly on Android (as they should) compared to iOS, and all the *major* apps are fine on Android, if not as polished as their iOS counterparts. For me, that’s enough to be very pleased with the Nexus 7.

Conclusion

So is it worth it? For me, yes. Google and Asus recovered spectacularly from a lukewarm Android tablet ecosystem and have achieved fantastic piece of hardware and software in the Nexus 7. However, if you are heavily invested in the iOS ecosystem already, the strong rumors of a 7.8″ iPad Mini launching by Q4 2012 warrant waiting for the undoubtedly well-polished Apple product.

If you have no particular allegiance to iOS, or Google apps are your top priority, there is no better tablet for $200 than the Nexus 7. Actually, there is no better 7″ tablet period (as of this writing). The 7″ form factor is fundamentally different than the 10″ iPad, and one could justify owning both. Given that the iPad is at least twice as expensive as the Nexus 7, I do not consider them comparable products. As a well-designed, one-hand, use-everywhere tablet, the Nexus 7 excels, and for that reason I am very satisfied with it.

I have built and traded watches for many years. During this time, I have seen and worn my fair share of haute Swiss chronometers, Japanese engineering marvels, and vintage American classics. Despite all of this, the watch that I wear most is a cheap, Chinese-made Tianjian Seagull 1963 reissue. It’s difficult to find a watch that matches the 1963′s aesthetic, history, and value.

The History

In 1961, the Tianjin Watch Company was directed by the Chinese government to design and manufacture a chronograph (a watch with a stopwatch function) for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF). At the time, Tianjin did not have the tooling necessary to produce chronographs with the precision required by military pilots; Tianjin acquired the designs and tooling of the hand-wound Venus 175 movement by Andre Frey of the Swiss Minerva Watch Company. As an aside, Minerva was acquired by the Richemont Group in 2006 to bolster Montblanc’s watch line.

In 1966, Tianjin Watch Company began manufacturing chronographs powered by a modified Venus 175 movement designated the ST3. The ST3 used 19 jewels in the movement compared to the Venus 175′s original 17. For some reason, after only a few thousand units, manufacturing ceased in 1969.

Fast forward four decades. By this time, Tianjian Watch Company was no longer a nationalized company and had been incorporated as Tianjin Seagull Corporation. It released a reissue of the PLAAF ST3 for the Chinese market, the  ”Tianjian Seagull 1963 Air Force Chronograph Reissue,” powered by a modern ST19 movement. Confusingly, the ST19 actually contains 21 jewels while the ST3 contains 19. Even more confusingly, the 1963 is (probably) a reference to the second batch of ST3 prototypes produced in 1963 – not the actual 1969 ST3.

The Aesthetic

Out of the box, the 1963 comes standard on an 18mm olive drab NATO strap. Like many watches made mid-century, the 1963 has a smaller 39mm face diameter. This is almost petite by modern watch standards, but those with skinny wrists (like me) or prefer classic looking watches will like it just fine.

The face of the 1963 is a handsome cream-white with gold Arabic indices, which allows for high visibility of the blue hands and the red chronograph hand. On the wrist, color palette managed to be striking without being gaudy. The case, pushers, and signed crown sport a polished finish.

Besides the upgrade to the ST19 movement, a few key aesthetic differences exist between the original ST3 and the 1963:

• The 1963 is available with a sapphire crystal option, as well as an option for an acrylic crystal. As a military watch, the original ST3 was manufactured with an acrylic crystal. The sapphire crystal is more durable and bestows the 1963 with a more refined look, but is a less accurate representation of the original. I chose the sapphire for durability.
• The 1963 features a display back emblazoned with the PLAAF insignia, offering a view of the nicely-decorated ST19 movement within. In stark contrast, the ST3 had an unmarked steel back hiding an plain movement.
• The 1963′s face has a red star and “21 Zuan (jewels)” at the top of the face where the ST3 has a Tianjin logo, and the 1963 says “China / Tianjin Watch Company” in Chinese characters at the bottom of the face.

While the factory olive strap gives the 1963 a fitting vintage military look, I opted for a strap in school livery. Fortunately, NATO straps can be changed with no tools, come in endless varieties, are cheap, and apparently pretty chic now. A visit to the J.Press in Cambridge, MA left me with a crimson and white NATO strap that attenuates the 1963′s ruggedness but adds a helluva lot of class.

Mr. Black, the manager of the Cambridge J.Press and a collector of vintage Waltham and LeCoultre watches, asked me what I was buying a strap for. When I showed him the 1963, he was quite impressed by the little Chinese watch and asked me to order one for him.

The Value

What makes the Seagull 1963 a compelling watch is its value. The 1963 offers a hand-winding, fully mechanical column wheel chronograph movement in a handsome case for $200. The column wheel mechanism is a fairly complex and traditional chronograph design – so much so that Longines feels compelled to market their chronographs as such. In contrast, a similar vintage Russian chronograph is pretty ugly (for some reason, the USSR could not design a good looking watch), and a Swiss chronograph easily costs over 10x as much.

Furthermore, for the price point, you’re hard-pressed to find a more impressive watch. The problem with watches (and any product in the luxury market) is that people assume spending $X means you couldn’t or wouldn’t spend more than $X, thus anyone having watch that costs $X+N instantly ‘wins’. I had a vintage Omega that I had restored for fun and very much liked, but upon trying to start a conversation with someone wearing the modern version I was met with a “why don’t you just buy a newer one?” I find this conspicuous consumption rather obnoxious and try to avoid it altogether; wearing the 1963 not only gives you great watch, but also a great conversation piece and a way to avoid the rampant brand consciousness that has invaded the watchmaking industry.

If it all sounds too good to be true, well, kind of. First, 1963′s are a pain in the ass to get your hands on. The only reliable domestic importer is Seagull 1963, who I won’t honor with a link because of their 100% markup. I’ve had good lucky buying six 1963′s for friends directly from the Seagull representative in Hong Kong, who can be reached at lhczthomas[AT]gmail.com. Otherwise, the easiest way is to find one is to make your way to Tianjin in northern China. Second, although I don’t believe that any watch is worth tens of thousands of dollars, for $200 the quality assurance on the 1963 is not perfect. I am compelled to leave you a caveat emptor: after all, it’s a cheap mechanical watch from China. My 1963 has kept +/-5 seconds per day and 40 hour runs with daily winding for a year now (more accurate than my COSC-certified Swiss chronometer), but you can pretty much expect that most 1963′s will show much greater variance.

Conclusion

Do you want a reliable, accurate watch? Then spend $15 on a Timex – a quartz movement keeps better time than a $50K Patek anyways. If, however, you want a fully mechanical chronograph with stunningly-good vintage looks, limitless strap options, and awesome history at an unbeatable $200 pricepoint, buy a Seagull 1963. There’s really nothing else like it.

“Which camera should I buy?” is a question I am frequently asked, often inappropriately, by people who are considering expensive DSLRs. Nine times out of ten, people actually mean to ask “how can I take better photographs?” (If you just want to upgrade to a newer compact to take pictures of friends with because yours is five years old, disregard this post and go for it)

As a gearhead, I appreciate the appeal of newer, cooler, better equipment. However, the camera is rarely the bottleneck, so put down that DSLR catalog and step away from Amazon. Consider why you want to buy a fancy camera. The primary purpose of advanced cameras is explicit control over parameters such as ISO, aperture, white balance, and focus points – if you don’t know what you are controlling and what they do, what’s the point? Like a high performance manual car, an advanced camera will give you fantastic results if you know how to use it, otherwise your results could very easily be worse than before. If you want to upgrade, be prepared to do some learning – the best results don’t come out-of-box.

For many people, learning the fundamentals of photography and applying that knowledge to the equipment they already have will result in better photographs than just upgrading hardware. After all, for the cost of a mid-range DSLR setup, one could fly to Europe and get awesome photos from an iPhone if they knew how to use it well.

Don’t believe me? The three photographs below, out of order, were taken with $350 of equipment, $1200 of equipment, and $4500 of equipment. If you can’t tell which is which, I’m not going to tell you. Knowing how to use the camera you have is more important than having a better camera. Having a better camera and knowing exactly how to use it is the best.

If you are still unconvinced, consider this: National Geographic went digital in 2003, with cameras that are terrible by today’s standards. I challenge you to find a photograph in a 2003 issue of National Geographic that makes you think “Gee, it’s too bad they were using such crappy cameras, because this photo really is lacking.” For almost a decade, NatGeo photographers have squeezed amazing photographs out of cameras that would be scoffed at by a contemporary Asian tourist.

So how can you take better photographs? Start with the many free resources available online, such as the lectures from Harvard’s CSE7 and the awesome Cambridge in Colour tutorials. Get involved in communities such as Photo.net, DPreview, and FredMiranda that can offer feedback and insight from seasoned professionals. Most importantly, take your camera off AUTO mode, and go shoot, shoot, shoot until you know exactly what you are doing. If, at this point, you feel that you are ready for a DSLR or other advanced camera, then I will have a better answer for you.