Booth eye tracking

Recently I was at a Trade Show (Money 2020 in Las Vegas) and was wondering how effective the booth designs were at getting people’s attention. There seem to be a number of apporaches people try

• Big Pictures to grab attention
• Videos on loop explaining stuff
• ‘Gimmicks’ on the stand
• Live Talks
• Text explaining products
• Slogans explaining mission

What’s not clear to me is which of these actually work. Annecdotially you can watch people go buy and see what they look at, and then observe who engages. But it struck me that it should be possible to do this more scientifically.

Why is there such a thing as default passwords?

Why in 2016 are people still shipping software and devices with default passwords? The recent IOT/Botnet that broke large chunks of the internet was entirely avoidable if the devices had been shipped without default passwords.

This is perfectly within the capability of a device manufactuer - even British Telecom (who have many many issues) have been shipping their devices with randomized passwords printed on a sticker on the device for years. It’s not hard to do that! With software it’s even easier you just force the user to pick a password and don’t ship them with admin/password or whatever you’ve decided is good enough.

Google Pixel - Initial Review

I ordered a Google Pixel when they were released as I needed a new personal Android phone and generally the Nexus line has been very good, so I thought I’d try the Pixel.

Some initial comments

• It looks nice, it compares well to my (work) iPhone 6 from a looks point of view
• The finger print reader is great, so far much more accurate and quick than my iphone one which seems to be getting slower and slower
• The USB cable ‘port your phone’ thing didn’t work at all with my old Android Phone (A Moto X). Instead I had to do it via the cloud
• It’s really quick - both apps and data seem faster that my old phone. Data is a bit odd as am in same place with same signal, but it does seem faster (good job I have unlimited data)
• The camera is very good (as reported), it won’t be replacing my DSLR for ‘good’ shots, but for quick shots it’s very good.

Overall it looks like a nice phone, I’ll have to use it for a few weeks to see how good it really is!

New Website

I’ve decided to finally move this site off blogger. It wasn’t adding much value so I’ve gone old-skool back to static HTML using Hugo.

The site is using a AMP based template so it should be super quick and responsive.